Lucas 2015 Archaeology and Contemporaneity

‫ۧۙ۩ۣۛ۠ٷ۝‪ө‬ڷ۠ٷۗ۝ۣۣۛ۠ۙٷۜۗۦۆ‬
‫‪ө‬ېۆ‪ۛҖ‬ۦۣ‪ۘۛۙғ‬۝ۦۖۡٷۗ‪۠ۧғ‬ٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞‪ҖҖ‬ۃۤۨۨۜ‬
‫‪ẽẮẳẬẰẺặẺẲẴẮẬặΝ́ẴẬặẺẲỀẰẾ‬ڷۦۣۚڷۧۙۗ۝۪ۦۙۧڷ۠ٷۣۢ۝ۨ۝ۘۘۆ‬
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‫ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۝۠‪Ө‬ڷۃۧۨۢ۝ۦۤۙۦڷ۠ٷ۝ۗۦۣۙۡۡ‪Ө‬‬
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‫‪Ң‬ڽڷ‪Ғ‬ڷڽڷۤۤڷۃ‪Ң‬ڽڼھڷۙۢ۩‪Ђ‬ڷ‪Җ‬ڷڽڼڷۙ۩ۧۧٲڷ‪Җ‬ڷھھڷۙۡ۩ۣ۠۔ڷ‪Җ‬ڷۧۙ۩ۣۛ۠ٷ۝‪ө‬ڷ۠ٷۗ۝ۣۣۛ۠ۙٷۜۗۦۆ‬
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‫ڽھڼڼڼڼ‪Ң‬ڽہڿڼھڼہڿڽۑٵۨۗٷۦۨۧۖٷ‪ۛҖ‬ۦۣ‪ۘۛۙғ‬۝ۦۖۡٷۗ‪۠ۧғ‬ٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞‪ҖҖ‬ۃۤۨۨۜڷۃۙ۠ۗ۝ۨۦٷڷۧ۝ۜۨڷۣۨڷ۟ۢ۝ۋ‬
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‫ڽھڼڼڼڼ‪Ң‬ڽہڿڼھڼہڿڽۑ‪Җ‬ۀڽڼڽ‪ғ‬ڼڽۃ۝ۣۘ‬
‫ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۝۠‪Ө‬ڷۃڷۣۧۢ۝ۧۧ۝ۡۦۙێڷۨۧۙ۩ۥۙې‬
‫‪Ң‬ڽڼھڷۺٷیڷۂڽڷۣۢڷڼ‪ғҢ‬ڿڽھ‪ғ‬ڿ‪Ң‬ڽ‪ғ‬ھۂڽڷۃۧۧۙۦۘۘٷڷێٲڷۃ‪ө‬ېۆ‪ۛҖ‬ۦۣ‪ۘۛۙғ‬۝ۦۖۡٷۗ‪۠ۧғ‬ٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞‪ҖҖ‬ۃۤۨۨۜڷۣۡۦۚڷۘۙۘٷۣۣ۠ۢ۫‪ө‬‬
discussion article
Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 1–15

C Cambridge University Press 2015
doi:10.1017/S1380203815000021
∗
Archaeology and contemporaneity Gavin Lucas
Abstract
This paper discusses the concept of contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology.
In particular, two general usages are examined. The first concerns the idea of
contemporaneity in the context of archaeological dating and chronology, the second
relates to the characterization of the archaeological record as a contemporary
phenomenon. In both cases, related concepts are explored, namely synchronism and
anachronism respectively. The paper offers a critique of these conventional usages
of the idea of contemporaneity and argues for an alternative, linking this with the
concept of consociation, a term coined by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz in the
early 20th century.
Keywords
contemporaneity; time; synchronism; anachronism; consociality
Introduction
The concept of contemporaneity in archaeology is a rather deceptive one.
On the one hand, it is a widely used term and one whose meaning seems
entirely self-evident; on the other hand, and as I shall argue in this paper,
it is a rather complex concept entangled in tacit ways with our broader
disciplinary perception of time. Over the past twenty years or so, there has
been a growing and quite diverse literature on time and archaeology (e.g.
Murray 1999; Karlsson 2001; Lucas 2005; Holdaway and Wandsnider 2008),
yet in all these texts it is difficult to find any sustained engagement specifically
with the idea of the contemporary. In this paper, I want to investigate
what are perhaps two of the most common dimensions of the concept of
contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology today. The first concerns how
contemporaneity is articulated in the context of archaeological dating and
chronology; that is, what we mean when we state that two sites, for example,
are contemporary. In particular, I shall highlight what is a very common and
usually implicit understanding of contemporaneity in this context, namely
synchronism. The second revolves around the common acknowledgement
that the archaeological record is a contemporary phenomenon. Here, I shall
∗ Gavin Lucas, University of Iceland. Email: [email protected].
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 May 2015 IP address: 192.153.213.50

2 discussion
highlight another, often implicit idea connected to this, that of anachronism.

Both synchronism and anachronism are influential sub-concepts which subtly
and often unconsciously shape our use of the term ‘contemporaneity’.
Moreover, I will suggest that they share the same basic articulation of time,
resulting in what I call an enveloping concept of contemporaneity where
objects are defined as contemporary in relation to a unit of time. In contrast,
I argue for a more relative definition, where contemporaneity is defined as a
relation between objects. I will start by exploring the idea of contemporaneity
in chronology and dating.
Contemporaneity in the archaeological record: a critique of synchronism

One of the most important goals of archaeological methodology since the
19th century has been the control of chronology, specifically the ability
to date sites, structures or finds as closely as possible. There is no doubt
that the advent in the 20th century of scientific dating techniques such as
dendrochronology and radiocarbon have yielded inestimable benefits for the
discipline and the current developments of Bayesian analysis for radiocarbon
dates are no exception (e.g. see Aitken 1990; Nash 2000). However, I would
like to ask us to pause and consider for a moment why we should seek tighter
and tighter chronological resolution. It seems so self-evident that we do not
even question it. But self-evident truths are often the most dangerous. To
help articulate this question, let us go back to the first radiocarbon revolution,
which was so eloquently narrated in Colin Renfrew’s book Before civilization:
C14 suddenly stretched our chronologies, and in Europe especially for the
Neolithic (Renfrew 1978). What this meant was that sites which might have
been considered contemporary were now were revealed to be 500 years
or more apart. It changed the understanding of prehistory immensely –
especially many of the then current orthodoxies about diffusion. The Bayesian
revolution of more recent times also expands our chronologies, but not so
much outward as inward, in terms of the resolution (e.g. see Baillie 1997; Buck
and Millard 2004). Sites that were previously considered contemporary are
now recognized as being 50 years or more apart. The concern for controlling
time in archaeology is thus arguably about distinguishing the contemporary
from the non-contemporary – and, as a consequence, the later from the earlier
or vice versa.
In many ways, establishing contemporaneity has been a more important
– and urgent – problem for archaeologists than establishing succession or
sequence. Childe, writing on the eve of the radiocarbon revolution, argued
that the most pressing concern of the day was tying together regional
sequences by means of what he called synchronism (Childe 1956, 104–10);
that is, establishing which part of one sequence was contemporary with which
part of another, and so on. The radiocarbon revolution certainly made this
possible in a way that cross-dating could never achieve with any reliability.
What Childe did not foresee, of course, was the degree to which European
prehistoric sequences, previously considered broadly synchronous, were in
fact off by hundreds, if not thousands, of years (Renfrew 1978). But methods
of absolute dating are only one means that archaeologists use to establish
contemporaneity. The most common has always been typology – that is,

Archaeology and contemporaneity 3
using finds of the same type to infer broad contemporaneity. We do this both
within a site to establish contemporaneity between features or layers but also,
of course, between sites. Indeed, prior to the radiocarbon revolution, cross-
dating using find types was the main method of linking separate sequences.
Within sites, establishing contemporaneity is actually something one cannot
do using stratigraphy; stratigraphy only gives sequence or succession, even if
it can bracket or constrain contemporaneity. Contemporaneity is something
one has to infer, either using similar methods to those used between sites, or
from morphological aspects of layers and features such as the compositional
similarity of deposits or spatial alignment of features (such as rows of
postholes; e.g. Carver 2009, 281–87). Indeed, on poorly stratified sites –
a rather more common occurrence than most field manuals like to admit,
especially in arable or deeply ploughed areas – contemporaneity becomes
the most important tool one has to establish sequence, for example by
grouping features with similar fills or those on a similar alignment, and then
using time-diagnostic finds or radiocarbon dates to order these groups into a
sequence. Seriation, one of the oldest archaeological dating techniques, uses
solely typological methods with frequencies and/or co-occurrence to create
sequence; it is a method which essentially works by separating contemporary
from non-contemporary material. Indeed, methods which start from the
problem of dissecting the contemporary from the non-contemporary form
a central part of archaeological inference in various aspects of fieldwork,
although they are often marginalized in conventional manuals (see Lucas,
forthcoming, for further discussion of this).
Despite the emphasis conventionally placed on establishing succession, it
seems to me that Childe was as astute as usual; the real problem, the real
challenge in many ways, facing archaeologists is not working out succession
but establishing contemporaneity, or what Childe called synchronism. Such
an emphasis does not eschew sequence, but rather sequence becomes
derivative or secondary to contemporaneity. Indeed, arguably all the attempts
to improve our chronological resolution, as suggested above, are really
about increasing our ability to distinguish the contemporary from the non-
contemporary. It is not enough to know these two burials date to the 9th
century B.C.; we want to know which decade or quarter of that century. The
quest for tighter resolution is the quest to refine what we mean when we say
that two sites or features are contemporary (or not). And this leads me on
to the critical question I want to pose about contemporaneity. What do we
mean when we say that two things are contemporary?
The Oxford English dictionary defines contemporaneity as something
which belongs to a certain time or period; when archaeologists talk about
contemporaneity in the context of dating, they usually mean something
which belongs to the same time as something else, where the term ‘time’
here is taken to mean a certain period or span of years. These definitions
are significant because it is clear that contemporaneity is conventionally
and broadly understood as a relation to a temporal period: two objects
are contemporary because they both date to the early 16th century, for
example. It effectively tries to reduce contemporaneity to an instance of
synchronism.

4 discussion
Here, the term Childe used for contemporaneity – synchronism – is highly

apposite. Synchronism implies the temporal alignment of two things, like
two dancers moving in tandem; the implication is one of perfect alignment
or symmetry, such that when one is even slightly out of step, we say they are
‘out of sync’. Implicitly, I would suggest that this is how we routinely use the
concept of contemporaneity in archaeology; when we say that two objects
or sites are contemporary, we mean that they are ‘in sync’. Yet we know
that this is actually rarely the case when we are talking about the temporal
relation between two objects; indeed, in some of our oldest techniques, like
seriation or find combination, lack of synchronism is actually a necessity.
Types have to overlap in order to draw out a sequence. This is an explicitly
non-synchronous idea of contemporaneity. Another way of saying this is that
contemporaneity is not a transitive relation: just because A is contemporary
with B and B is contemporary with C, it does not follow that A and C are
contemporary. Transitivity only applies if the temporalities of things all align
perfectly, as is implied under synchronism.
Non-synchronism is also recognized in other ways archaeologically. For
example, objects in archaeological contexts can be contemporary in some
ways and not in others. Two objects might have been made 50 years apart and
thus be non-contemporary in terms of manufacture, but have been deposited
at the same moment and thus indeed contemporary. This is, of course,
something that has been discussed widely by archaeologists, not least in
Scandinavia in relation to the definition of closed or secure find combinations
from Worsaae and Montelius to the present day, and is understood as critical
to correct dating (e.g. Rowe 1962; Gräslund 1987).
What both of these examples illustrate – examples of some of the earliest
archaeological methods in chronology – is a very different concept of
contemporaneity to the OED definition. The difference comes down to a very
simple point. In the cases of seriation and find combination, contemporaneity
is defined as a relation between objects, which is made possible because
objects are acknowledged as having variously extended lives. This is perhaps
why it is also easier to apply a non-synchronous model of contemporaneity
to processes over events: processes such as the emergence of agriculture take
place over long periods of time and it is much easier to acknowledge overlap
than with, say, a short-term event like a burial. Defining contemporaneity
of two burials will perhaps always be done in terms of synchronism, not
only because of the limits of our dating resolution, but also because of the
contrived separation of the punctual nature of the event against the protracted
character of process.
But whether one is talking about events, processes or objects, chronology
should always remain purely a scale of measurement here for coordinating the
relations between these things. Two objects (or events) are not contemporary
because they both date to the late 4th century B.C.; they are contemporary
because their life spans overlap or imbricate. Chronology is solely used as a
means to establish this overlap (or not). In the case of absolute dating and its
tacit synchronism, however, contemporaneity is implicitly defined in relation
to a period or unit of time. It is what you might call an enveloping concept of
contemporaneity, where sites or objects are forced to fit into pre-given time

ranges. The smaller you can make these ranges (i.e. increase resolution), the
more precise your ascription of contemporaneity. I would argue that we too
easily fall into the second – and arguably inadequate – definition of contem-
poraneity because of the dominance of chronology as our model of time.
One of the advantages of adopting the first definition, i.e. making
contemporaneity a relation between objects, is that it forces us to ask about
the meaning of contemporaneity in terms of the longevity of the objects being
related. This means that the question of chronological resolution has to be
made relative to the temporality of the objects under investigation. Asking, for
example, whether two sites are contemporary, where both sites’ occupations
span several centuries, why would we need a resolution tighter than a century?
Obviously there are many objects whose longevity falls below the threshold of
our current dating techniques so I am certainly not arguing that we abandon
the goal of refining our chronological tools. My argument is rather that we
should not always assume that tighter resolution is intrinsically better; it has
to be relative to the temporality of the objects under investigation.
Another advantage of making contemporaneity a relation between objects
is that it allows overlap or imbrication, a property which has long been
exploited in archaeological techniques such as seriation and find combination.
However, this property has subsequently been marginalized in more general
interpretive accounts which favour a more segmented view of time. It is no
great revelation to state that the basic model of time used in archaeology is
linear; whether one is dealing with stratigraphic sequences, radiocarbon dates
linked to our calendrical system, or simply period divisions, time is perceived
as flowing in one direction (see e.g. Lucas 2005). One of the problems with
this idea of linearity is that temporal succession or sequence is conceived as a
series of intervals or points derived from divisions of a line. The line is primary,
the intervals are secondary or derivative. As a result, there can be no gaps
between them and no overlap either. However large or small the segments
into which you cut the line (e.g. years, decades, centuries), each segment runs
tight up against those on either side. This is the form of the classic timescales
we use, both clock time and calendrical time. This model of time consequently
dictates the range of temporal relations we employ, of which there are only
three: before/earlier, after/later and contemporary – where contemporaneity
is, of course, essentially synchronism. These concepts are enshrined in dating
tools such as stratigraphy or terminus post quem (TPQ) and terminus ante
quem (TAQ). What other tools, like seriation, demonstrate is the paucity of
this triad and the need for a more sophisticated model of articulating the
temporality of objects and especially the concept of contemporaneity.
There is actually a very useful model already in existence which has only
recently been explored by archaeologists working in computing (Binding
2010). It is a time-interval algorithm developed in the context of research
into artificial intelligence by James Allen (1983) in the 1980s and it proposes
thirteen different temporal relations (what are now called Allen operators)
as opposed to the three most currently in use in archaeology (figure 1).
Immediately, one sees how the idea of overlap or imbrication actually
covers multiple possibilities and varieties, and some work employing these
algorithms has already been explored as part of an English Heritage-funded

6 discussion
Figure 1 The main temporal relationships under Allen’s temporal logic; six of them can be inverted,
resulting in a total of thirteen possible relations (source: author, after Allen 1981).
project on digital technologies called STAR (Semantic Technologies for

Archaeological resources; see Binding 2010). It seems to me that their
potential application for developing more sophisticated chronologies in
archaeology is quite high. To give just one obvious example, using the full
panoply of Allen operators instead of the usual three temporal relations in
constructing stratigraphic matrices would enable a much more sophisticated
model of site development – and most of the complexity will revolve around
the variations of imbrication.
In summary, then, the linear model of time we use has essentially driven
us to adopt a very impoverished concept of contemporaneity, one which
effectively is reducible to synchronism because contemporaneity is defined as
a relation to a unit of time. In this section, I have argued for foregrounding an
alternative concept, one which already has a deep pedigree in archaeological
method but which has been marginalized, the idea of contemporaneity as
a relation between objects. If we draw on this idea, issues of dating and
chronological resolution become points to argue for rather than to take for
granted; they become relative to our interpretation of objects, rather than

vice versa. In the next section, I want to explore another dimension of this
issue and I will argue that the same impoverished model of contemporaneity
as synchronism has affected the way we look at the archaeological record.
Contemporaneity of the archaeological record: a critique of anachronism

It is almost a truism to say that the archaeological record is a contemporary
phenomenon. It has been articulated by Binford (1983) as an epistemic
problem and by Shanks (2012) as the ontological basis for archaeology: we
do not have access to the past, but only to what remains of the past in the
present. This is a point that has been long appreciated, but its understanding
has changed – and changed dramatically, I believe – since the 19th century.
Today, the emphasis is given to the gap or distance between present and
past, but in the 19th century there was no gap – the past was present in the
present. Today, the contemporary nature of the archaeological record is often
considered a problem to be solved. For antiquarians, its contemporariness
was, in contrast, what made a study of the past possible in the first place. I
want to spend some time exploring this distinction, and to do it by connecting
the concept of contemporaneity with another related term – anachronism.
Various words have been used to characterize the nature of the
archaeological record: ‘remains’, ‘vestiges’, ‘ruins’, ‘relics’, ‘traces’ and
‘fragments’. The list could go on, and while many terms are still current,
some have a certain antiquarian ring to them (e.g. ‘vestiges’). What is striking,
however, about these antiquarian terms is that they foreground an aspect
of the archaeological record that was of great theoretical concern in the
19th century, but one we completely bypass today. What characterizes the
terms ‘relic’ or ‘vestige’ is their untimeliness: they are from another era,
anachronisms, survivals. Indeed it is no coincidence to observe in texts from
the mid- and late 19th century the close relationship that existed between
material remains and what came to be called survivals; that is, extant customs
or practices which no longer have any obvious purpose, like vestigial organs
(see Lucas 2012 for an extended discussion of this issue). In fact, up to the
middle of the 19th century, the word ‘antiquities’ was commonly used to
refer to both; it was only with the crystallization and separation of academic
disciplines in the last quarter of the 19th century that such differences also
started to emerge, and with them a loss of sensibility to issues such as the
temporality of the archaeological record. It is very instructive to read Edward
Tylor’s work on survivals in this regard, because he quite explicitly saw
survivals and relics (terms Tylor himself used) as the twin pillars of the study
of the past (Tylor 1865).
What is important about this characterization of the archaeological record
is that it is very much defined in relation to the contemporary; what makes
relics and survivals significant is their non-contemporariness to other objects
or customs. Their status as anachronisms formed the very basis and possibility
of studying the past. However, it is also interesting to see how this concept of
anachronism changed orientation at the end of the 19th century and into the
early 20th – a change that was very much aligned with the consolidation or
professionalization of the academic disciplines of history and archaeology. For
with the advent of professionalization came a new concern for systematizing

8 discussion
knowledge. This period saw the growth of publications on historical and

archaeological methodology, and with it a growing sense of the impact of the
scholar on interpretations of the past. Issues of objectivity and the removal
of subjectivity, expressed through concepts such as historical distance and
hindsight and the curse of presentism (or the fallacy of nunc pro tunc), became
central to such methodological reflections (e.g. Ashplant and Wilson 1988a;
1988b). In short, anachronism was no longer about objects or practices
from the past, occurring in the present, but rather about the historian or
archaeologist projecting their conceptual frameworks or agendas into the
past. The arrow of anachronism was reversed, so to speak.
In archaeology, this epistemic concern mostly crystallized around the role of
ethnographic analogy. Where relics and survivals had worked alongside each
other, survivals now morphed into something else for archaeologists. Lubbock
and Sollas’s works were written just as this change was happening. Australian
Aborigines were both survivals from and analogies for the Palaeolithic. There
is a definite ambiguity about which. Over the course of the 20th century, the
role of historic and contemporary peoples and material culture as analogies
for interpreting the deeper past became central to bridging the gap between
past and present. Such a role became consolidated through middle-range
research and middle-range theory from the 1970s. However it was expressed,
though, the central problem of analogy has always been the same: the danger
of making the past too much like the present (Wylie 1985). One solution,
of course, is to embrace this through the principle of uniformitarianism: the
past is like the present, because the same basic processes are operating now
as they did then. This may work for geology, but archaeologists differ greatly
on how applicable such a principle is to human society or culture, although
it is interesting to note a recent resurgence in this issue in the context of
cross-cultural universals (e.g. see Lloyd 2010; Shyrock and Smail 2011).
In summary, then, I would suggest that in the 19th century, the
archaeological record itself was the anachronism. Today, it is our own
subjectivity, imposed on interpretations of the past, that is anachronistic,
which in the context of archaeology is principally expressed though the role
of analogy. At the same time, though, we do not tend to worry much about this
either any more; indeed, we accept subjectivity and analogy as often necessary
elements in the interpretive process, a hermeneutic fusion of horizons. Indeed,
we accept that the past is always a contemporary construct – which does not
of course mean that it did not happen or that we pluck our interpretations out
of thin air. But analogies and the danger of presentism should not be given too
much epistemic weight. The playful status of analogy today in archaeology is
perhaps well captured in a genre of contemporary images which work with
the idea of anachronisms (figure 2). These images are interesting, because
in many ways they are negatives of the way 19th-century antiquarians may
have viewed past objects. Such modern images perhaps recapture for us how
19th-century antiquarians may have felt about encountering remains from
the past – the same sense of matter out of place, temporally speaking. We do
not feel like this about archaeology any more. Perhaps we never did, but it
is a provocative thought nonetheless because it reminds us of the theoretical
status that anachronism once held for our discipline.

Figure 2 Abraham Lincoln with a boom box; this image was posted widely on the Internet in 2011
(original source unknown).
Despite this, I am uncertain whether anachronism itself is a very useful

idea. The crux of the concept refers to an object or custom or way of thought
which is out of its proper time. And this raises the question of what constitutes
the ‘proper’ time for an object or thought. No doubt archaeology itself has
helped to create the perceived proper temporal order for things, but more
generally this is probably the legacy of modernist thinking insofar as the
trope of modernity defines the very possibility of something being untimely.
And this brings us back to the idea of contemporaneity as a relation to a
period of time, which I discussed earlier. What makes something untimely
is an idea of contemporaneity which works off the notion of the present
as an era or period. For 19th-century antiquarians, archaeological remains
were non-contemporary because they did not belong to the present – that
is, the modern era. The present, as distinct from the past, and the modern
as distinct from the ancient or premodern, are the classic chronoschisms of
modernity, but they also peform the same function as any periodization: they
make contemporaneity a question of belonging to a certain unit or stretch of
time. This is exactly the same chronotype being played out here, as with my
earlier discussion of chronology.
By the same logic, though, we can rethink contemporaneity in other
terms. More precisely, we can adopt a concept of contemporaneity where
contemporaneity is principally about the temporal relation between things,
rather than between things and an abstract measure of time. This is the
challenge: to think about contemporaneity without drawing on the tropes of
synchronism or anachronism. When we say that the archaeological record is a
contemporary phenomenon, what we really mean is that it is a phenomenon of
our present time, where the present time is conceived as a temporal envelope,

10 discussion
defined by synchronicity and distinguished from the past (or future). But if we
eschew this conception, then how should we conceptualize contemporaneity?
We could use the same terminology I developed in the previous section,
of imbrication or overlapping and even characterize it through those Allen
operators. But somehow the stakes appear to change once one of the objects
involved in a temporal relation is oneself. The contemporaneity of the present
is more than the contemporaneity of two things overlapping for a given
interval or unit of time. The difference here is that contemporaneity in the
former needs to be articulated through a tensed conception of time (i.e. past–
present–future) as opposed to a purely successional one (earlier–later) – that
is, it needs to articulate a concept of the present but in such a way that it does
not reduce it to a time period or punctum in a successional view of time. This
difference is especially felt in discussions regarding the status of archaeologies
of the contemporary past, as Harrison (2011) has recently alluded to, where
the concept of contemporaneity is deeply problematic.
This distinction can be related to a rather old philosophical discussion by
McTaggart at the start of the 20th century, where he contrasted two types of
time series, A (past–present–future) and B (earlier–later), and argued that it
was impossible to reduce one to the other (McTaggart 1908; also see Lucas
2005). Part of the problem with McTaggart’s analysis, however, lies in his
attributing a serial or successional nature in the first place to the tensed
(A series) view of time. When it comes to talking about the past, present
and future, I would suggest that we have to dispense with any notion of
succession altogether. In order to see how this might affect our understanding
of contemporaneity, let me develop this point through an analogy. A few
years ago, I had a discussion with an eminent archaeologist about two types
of handkerchief user – the folder and the scruncher, depending on how you
retained the handkerchief in your pocket for use. The folder always has the
handkerchief neatly folded over on itself in a flattened square or rectangle,
while the scruncher has a messy ball. Our conversation did not shift into
one about time, but the distinction is an interesting one to use when the two
sorts of handkerchief are viewed as representing two different chronotypes.
In the folded handkerchief, time is successional through the neat layers of the
folded handkerchief. What belongs in one fold belongs there and nowhere
else. This object is Neolithic, not Bronze Age or Iron Age. With the scrunched
handkerchief, time is messy and any two points on it can touch. An object
made in the Neolithic can also irrupt into the Iron Age or in fact our own
present.
The analogy of the scrunched handkerchief is actually a famous metaphor
used by the French philosopher Michel Serres in his conversation about time
and contemporaneity with Bruno Latour (Serres and Latour 1995, 60), and
one which has often been quoted in archaeology (Witmore 2006; Holtorf
2002). With the folded-handkerchief chronotype, contemporaneity is clearly
defined in relation to an era or period – a fold in the handkerchief. With
the scrunched handkerchief, however, contemporaneity is defined by the
particular relation between any two or more points on the fabric. It is a
point of contact. Serres has also used another metaphor, that of percolation,
where time not only folds back on itself, but also is filtered as through a

sieve (Serres and Latour 1995, 58). Some events or objects persist in their
effects while others cease. These might sound like rather vague metaphors and
indeed they perhaps are – but that is also because we still lack an adequate
vocabulary to articulate this new conception of time. This is what Serres was
searching for. The idea of succession seems more concrete because it has been
made so through centuries of use. The idea of percolation seems abstract
and vague because it is still an idea; it needs working through. Such work
has already begun (e.g. Witmore 2006; 2009; 2013), for in reflecting on the
archaeological record, percolation seems an eminently appropriate concept:
some objects from the past irrupt into the present, others slip away forever,
others simply wait or pause – they may or may not re-emerge.
Fundamentally, I would suggest that a central concept here is that of
persistence, an issue which preoccupied other philosophers of time at the
start of the 20th century, especially Bergson (1991) and Husserl (1966). In a
way, persistence returns us to the antiquarian notion of the relic and the very
possibility of archaeology: the persistence of the past in the present. I believe
that this is a very positive idea that we simply have forgotten or take for
granted today. What I would do, however, is drop the idea of anachronism
which accompanied this notion for antiquarians; our task is rather to step
sideways and explore modes of persistence, the reason being that we are
talking about the temporality of things in relation to one another, not time
per se. It is a temporality much closer to memory in the way it operates than
conventional, historical time (see Olivier 2011 here for an extended discussion
on this). Thus the contemporaneity of the archaeological record is not about
its existence in our present, but rather about its particular mode of persistence
that interconnects past, present and future.
In bringing this issue around to the temporality of things, we have in
many ways ended at the same place as the previous section. In both cases,
the vernacular concept of contemporaneity in archaeology was shown to
be inadequate and linked to the ideas of synchronism and anachronism
respectively. In both cases, the important question hinges on the temporality
of things – their imbrication on the one hand and their survival or persistence
on the other. In both cases, we need to expand what these terms mean, to
draw out a taxonomy. There are multiple forms of imbrication, as Allen’s
temporal logic has shown; there are also diverse modes of persistence, as
indicated by Serres’s metaphors. To develop a more complex and useful
concept of contemporaneity in archaeology, ultimately we need to understand
how temporality is bound to an object’s identity and how it mediates its
relation to other objects. To that end, I want to close this paper with a third
and final section which explores the idea of consociality.
Consociality and writing archaeology in the contemporary mode

The concept of consociality derives from the writings of Alfred Schutz,
a phenomenologist working in the mid-20th century. In his studies on
the phenomenology of the social world from the 1930s, Schutz made an
important observation that what matters in understanding social relations
and time is not contemporaneity but consociality (Schutz 1967). Any two
people might be contemporaries, and live at the same time in history, but if

12 discussion
their paths never cross and they never affect each others’ lives, this relation
is irrelevant. Thus we might question the meaningfulness of being able to
demonstrate that a farmer living near Cahokia in the 13th century A.D. was
a contemporary with a peasant living near London at the same time. What
matters is that they shared the same physical space as well as time, that they
constituted a we-relation, as the phrasing goes. This notion of consociates
actually lies at the basis of how we often use the term ‘contemporaries’ – of
course, people of the same generation or age cohort – but Schutz wanted to
emphasize the importance of not separating space from time.
Now although Schutz’s concept of consociality is important, we do need
to give it a less phenomenological flavour because, as it stands, it entails
problematic consequences. For example, teaching to a room full of students
would constitute them as my consociates, even if only temporary, but the
president of the United States is technically not my consociate, only a
contemporary. We have never met, we probably never will, and in no way
do we constitute a ‘we’, in the way ‘we’ do when I am present in a classroom
with my students. On the other hand, the president is affecting my life –
perhaps not to the same extent as he affects others – but nonetheless it is hard
to use physical proximity as a primary way to define consociality. We all
know the cliche about a butterfly flapping its wings in South America and the
weather changing in Central Park; chains of causation need to be integrated
into this idea of consociality. We need to de-phenomenologize it. A second
and related thing we need to do is to disconnect it from its association purely
with people. People can be consociated with things and even things can be
consociated with other things.
However, in redefining consociality this way – an actor-network-theory
(ANT) version of consociality, if you like – have we not torn down the
original distinction between contemporaries and consociates and just replaced
one term with another? At one extreme, you could say that everything is
connected, and therefore everything is consocial. At a very general level, this
may well be true, but it is not terribly helpful. The task is rather to trace
gradients of consociality, and identify the more important relations between
things. Part of doing this requires that we have good control over the space–
time coordinates of these relations. In archaeology, high-resolution dating
helps this. But this is only part of the job. If we are to preserve the distinction
between contemporaries and consociates, then, it will be a difference of degree
rather than one of kind. However, in tying the conception of consociality
to agency, we are now faced with a new problem. Let us turn Schutz’s
original point on its head. Can two people be consociates without being
contemporaries? To give a blunt example: can I be a consociate of Abraham
Lincoln? Schutz had other terms for consociates who were not contemporaries
– ‘successors’ and ‘predecessors’ – but if consociality is defined differently, as
I have just done, then such terms become redundant. Indeed, the whole idea
of successors and predecessors reverts back to a successional conception of
contemporaneity which is what we have been trying to avoid in this paper.
Surely agency or affect can be distributed through time as well as space?
Surely Abe and I can be consociates? Is not that, after all, the point of Serres’s
crumpled handkerchief?

I would argue so, but, as with the original distinction, we need to qualify
it, especially in terms of reciprocity. If Lincoln and I are to be defined as
reciprocal consociates – that is, people who can affect each other – then one
argument would be that we both need to be alive at the same time. Clearly
we are not; Lincoln died in 1865, 100 years exactly before I was born. This
is not to suggest that he or his past actions have not affected me today; they
surely have, however weakly. But because he no longer exists and ceased
existing before I came into existence, it is difficult to argue that I can affect
him in anyway whatsoever. Our consociation is one-way, or asymmetrical.
The same is not true of Lincoln’s bloodstained coat, which he wore the night
of his assassination; this still exists (owned by the Ford Theatre where he was
shot), so I can affect it and it can act upon me. Indeed, I can affect objects of
all kinds directly or indirectly associated with Lincoln, and as a result alter
the present perception of who he was.
Now one could claim that in doing this I am changing the past and thus
negating the idea of non-reciprocity with non-contemporaries. However, I
feel that this move makes a major leap of abstraction. Our perception and
representation of the past is, of course, moulded or constructed in the present,
using remains from the past. We can quite seriously change the effect the past
has on us by how we choose to interact with its remains. In this way, the
present can affect the past – or rather the persistence of the past in the
present. But the trouble is, we are not talking about the past – we are talking
about Abraham Lincoln. Talking about the past slips us back into the old
terminology of past and present as periods or slices of time. The point about
using contemporaneity to rethink these temporal relations is that the focus
remains on things themselves and their persistence.
But in focusing the attention on the object – in this case Lincoln – we are
forced to respond to the issue of how we then choose to define this object
we call Abraham Lincoln. At a time when we freely talk about distributed
persons and how people and their things are connected (e.g. Strathern 1988;
Gell 1998; Fowler 2004), can we really say that Lincoln no longer exists if his
coat (and no doubt many of his other personal possesions) are still around?
If Lincoln was more than his body, then surely there is a case for arguing
that, in some small way, a part of him still exists. Lincoln persists, albeit in
a very attenuated form. One might counter this by pointing out that I am
conflating Lincoln the being with Lincoln the idea or memory; Lincoln died
over a century ago, but the idea of Lincoln, our collective or social memory of
him, lives on through objects like his coat, but also through other things like
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, the image reproduced in figure 2
or even the 2012 Steven Spielberg film. But why create this division between
Lincoln and the idea of him? Why revert to the deep division between world
of spirit and world of matter? Can anyone separate their identity from what
other people think of them? Can we separate the idea of Lincoln from the
hundreds and thousands of objects, images, books and films that relate to
him? Can we draw a line between Lincoln’s coat (as a distributed part of
Lincoln the man) and Lincoln’s coat (as part of Lincoln the myth)?
If the idea of a distributed person collapses any ontological distinction
between Lincoln and the idea of Lincoln, as I am suggesting here, then surely

14 discussion
we can argue that Lincoln and I are in fact reciprocal consociates, and by
extension, of course, all the people in prehistory whose remains have survived
for us to unearth and study. I think this is a reasonable claim, but once again
rather than simply accept it, the real task is to define gradients of reciprocity:
what precisely is the agential relationship between myself and Lincoln? How
strong are the vectors of influence between us and what form do they take?
Just because we cannot draw any ontological divide between Lincoln’s coat
and the Lincoln Memorial (or the Spielberg film) we are not prevented from
still making a distinction. However distributed Lincoln might be, his core
or centre resides around his body and that body interacted with that coat
– unlike the memorial (which was erected in the early 20th century) or the
more recent film. One might even talk of degrees of separation here; the coat
lies at one degree, whereas the movie (and myself) lie at the nth degree.
To bring this discussion back to the topic at hand, namely the concept of
contemporaneity in and of the archaeological record, it seems clear that there
is a much more complex set of issues to be addressed than is often assumed.
The concept of consociation, as articulated here, is offered as a way to think
about how we articulate the idea of contemporaneity, both in our narratives
of the past and in our comprehension of the relation between ourselves and
what remains of the past. Indeed, ultimately this is significant because of the
consequences it has for how we represent the past and its relation to the
present. One of the most important of these consequences, I would suggest,
is related to the temporal voice we use in archaeological narratives. We need
to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary.
It should be clear by this point in the paper that by the contemporary mode,
I do not mean something as naively simple as writing with an understanding
that the narrative is written in the present. Contemporaneity is not the same
as the present, which is merely a period designation, a punctum. A narrative
written in the contemporary mode is one which is attendant to the changing
interplay between present, past and future tense. And this will vary depending
on the objects – or subject – being selected. Perhaps the most critical question
here lies in deciding the subject position of the narrative. If everything I
have argued here is accepted, then it should be clear that the temporality of
any narrative is bound and relative to subject or object positions – there is no
general chronology or periodization. This is not to reject chronology as a tool,
nor is it to reject the use of periodization as a narrative framework; it is only to
insist on its relativity to the subject. Each subject will have its own temporality,
which frames the nature of contemporaneity and consociality. The temporal
span of that subject will frame the beginning and end of the narrative and
it is the interval between these points that determines the configuration of
consociality, particularly the gradients of consociation and reciprocity.
A narrative that starts at 500 B.C. and ends at 400 B.C. has a different
set of agential possibilities than one which spans 400–300 B.C. This field
of possibilities changes as one slides the end point back or forward, and
therefore, depending on what we take as our point of reference, history
will appear slightly different each time. Gradients of reciprocity will change
between objects as some objects either cease to exist or subsist weakly in
a distributed manner, like Lincoln’s coat. To write in the contemporary

The knots of narrative 15
mode means acknowledging the relevance of the time frame, it means

acknowledging the relevance of the subject; history not only looks different
depending on where one chooses to start or end the narrative, it also looks
different depending on which subject position is chosen to write the narrative
from. This is about embracing fully a multi-subject and multi-temporal
archaeology, where the subjects can be anything from humans to horses,
pyramids to pots, and where the temporality of these subjects defines the
mode of contemporaneity.
Acknowledgements
This paper was originally devised as a presentation at a Mellon colloquium at
the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, in 2013, on Archaeology, Heritage and
the Mediation of Time; subsequent modified versions were given at a series of
departmental seminars in Stockholm, Southampton, Manchester and Bergen
during 2013 and 2014. This final written paper has benefited immensely
from the feedback received during discussion after these presentations and
I would like to thank collectively (and anonymously) all those who raised
points of discussion which have helped to improve the final article. I would,
though, especially like to thank Graeme Earl at Southampton for making me
aware of the archaeological applications of James Allen’s time algorithms.
Finally, I would like to thank the editorial committee of Archaeological
dialogues and an anonymous reviewer for their commments on this final
version.

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000033
The knots of narrative.

∗
Contemporaneity and its relation to history
Zoë Crossland
In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts

us to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary. This
is to attend to the shifting interplay between past, present and future,
undertaken through a focus on the relations between objects, in contrast
to the impoverished concern with succession and order that a notion of
chronological contemporaneity imposes. His paper undertakes the useful task
of disentangling concepts around time and contemporaneity, and raises a
number of interesting questions. Here, I would like to discuss two of the
most compelling contributions of Lucas’s paper: the foregrounding of modes
of persistence and of consociality, both of which I would like to explore by
reflecting on my experiences of historical narrative and alternate temporalities
in the history of highland Madagascar. The issue of persistence introduces
the question of historical privilege – that is, how do some things persist while
∗ Zoë Crossland, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA.

Email: [email protected].

16 discussion
others fall to dust? And how is that persistence recognized and maintained?
This same question of recognition (and misrecognition) is also at the heart
of consociality; how are consociates acknowledged as contemporaneous, and
what room is there for refusal?
The idea of writing in the contemporary mode is seductive, and offers
a great deal in terms of a productive reorientation of our archaeological
narratives. In many ways what Lucas proposes is a powerful new chronotopic
configuration for archaeological narrative. As Lucas has explored elsewhere
(Lucas 2005, 49–50), the chronotope concept, as developed by Mikhail
Bakhtin (1981), offers a great deal for archaeologists. For Bakhtin, the
chronotope was an expression of the various ways in which time and space
were fixed and melded in literature. Taking the example of classical Greek
adventures, he showed how they were populated with recurring spatio-
temporal motifs, including meeting and parting, loss and acquisition, search
and discovery. The chronotope is the ‘organizing center’ for narrative events;
it is ‘where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’ (Bakhtin 1981, 250).
Along these lines, Rosemary Joyce (2002, 34–38) has explored the narrative
chronotopes of the quest and evolutionary progress in popular archaeology.
Here, as Lucas observes, the narrative organization is tied to an understanding
of the past as distanced from the present through a rigidly unfolding order
of temporal succession. Lucas instead suggests that we move away from the
automatic periodization of past and present in order to better understand the
modes of persistence and consociality through which objects relate to each
other and remain present. How is the relationship between past, present and
future figured and narrated?
Understanding the narrative frame through which archaeological evidence
is made meaningful is a key problem of archaeographical practice. Yet
in doing this, Lucas’s paper works to do two things that perhaps don’t
sit together entirely comfortably. It offers a powerful analysis of what
contemporaneity is, and also suggests that archaeology should be written
in ‘the mode of the contemporary’ (p. 14). There is a tension between
the promise of an archaeology written in a chronotopic mode that takes
as its orienting principle that the past is not past and that objects persist
through their relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the claim that
such an archaeology is one that attends to ‘the changing interplay between
present, past and future tense’ (p. 14). As a chronotopic configuration for
narrating archaeological materials, the notion of writing in the mode of the
contemporary is extraordinarily fecund. However, as a way of exploring the
changing interplay between past, present and future, it seems to foreclose
on historical possibilities that might indeed push the past into the past and
distance it from the present. The mode of the contemporary seems to be
a particular figuring of the relationship between past and present, rather
than a means of discovering what that relationship might be at different
moments.
Here, then, I would like to explore two issues. First, in highlighting
contemporaneity as expressed through relationships between objects
and subjects, how might other questions around non-contemporaneity
be obscured? What room is there for less tangible dimensions of

non-contemporaneity (cf. Derrida 1994)? How should we make sense of

those who refuse to recognize a relationship of contemporaneity with
others? Equally, how might we expand the frame beyond of modes of
persistence and consociality to consider how some objects and people are
denied contemporaneity? Admittedly, the denial of contemporaneity (or of
coevalness, to echo Johannes Fabian (1983) is closely related to understanding
modes of persistence and consociality – but it also seems to demand something
more.
Second, and related to this, is the question of how an archaeology in
the chronotopic mode of the contemporary can be extended out of the
realm of narrative critique and into the world of lived experience: how is
history or contemporaneity understood as it is made? As archaeologists,
we are concerned not only with narrative but also with enacted experience
in the past and how this comes into recognition. Indeed, the question
of recognition seems to me to be a primary and undertheorized area of
concern for archaeology. Lucas’s paper raises a number of interesting issues
in relation to this, notably, what are the possibilities for other temporal
frameworks through which history and contemporaneity are produced
and anticipated? This question is clearly present in Lucas’s paper, but
is not as fully developed as other aspects of the theme. What kind of
futures were imagined by past people, and whose futures were realized?
How was the past conceptualized in relation to the present, and how did
this preserve and promulgate the material and immaterial traces that we
inherit?
In writing about Lincoln’s continuing – albeit attenuated – existence in and
through objects such as his coat, historical texts and national monuments, we
attend to the way in which a particular past is privileged and narrated, and
how it is made present today. But what might this offer for approaching
Lincoln’s understanding of his own relationships, his temporality, and
relations to past and future? If we are to take seriously consociality and the
non-contemporaneity of the present, how might that encourage a rethinking
of temporal relationships not simply in relation to archaeological narrative,
but also in earlier times? In other words, how might an archaeology written
in the mode of the contemporary reframe the question of ‘the past in the
past’? A key issue here is how the future is imagined, and what its relation
is to present and past. And here I would like to push back against Lucas’s
suggestion that we need to ‘dispense with any notion of succession altogether’
(p. 10).
There is a fundamental asymmetry in the contrasting relationships between
present and past on the one hand, and present and future on the other. This
is an asymmetry that must be grappled with. Following Reinhart Koselleck
(2004), we can contrast the ‘space of experience’ of the present and past, and
the ‘horizon of expectation’ that defines the future. Events and processes of
the past and present have spatial extension and an existence that can be seen
and documented; they also have a diachronicity that cannot be avoided.
The future, in contrast can only be thought, anticipated, projected, but
never experienced directly. Koselleck’s conceptual categories of the present–
past ‘space of experience’ and the future ‘horizon of expectation’ provide

18 discussion
a framework for examining the conditions of historical possibility. These

exist in the variegated interplay between present–past and the anticipated
future, however imagined – whether in a mode of the contemporary or of
chronological succession.
I would like to turn to Madagascar at this point to consider an alternate
way to imagine the relationship between past, present and future. Here,
I hope to build on Lucas’s discussion to further think about persistence
and consociality in relation to the historical imaginary of the 19th century.
Highland Madagascar is well known from Maurice Bloch’s work (Bloch
1971; 1977) as a place where the past is vibrantly alive in the present. The
past never recedes out of view but rather – with some important qualifications
– remains present and known. This is reiterated in the terminology for time,
where the word for the past (taloha) is translatable as ‘there, in front of one’s
head’ (Dahl 1999, 43). This is reiterated in the way in which ‘today’ is divided
conceptually into two, with a term for the part of the day that has already
passed (androany), and another for the part that is yet to come (anio). Here
the key distinction is between the ultimately unknowable future, which lies
invisible behind one, and the known and experienced present-past, which is
quite literally available to view and interact with in the landscape. However,
this present-past ‘space of experience’ was created through violence and
political will. It was articulated to a particular future through the historical
privilege of some actors and at the expense of others.
It is useful at this point to shift away from a notion of history as
textual representation to use another formulation that draws upon history’s
characterization in many parts of Madagascar. Standing stones, for example,
are described in oral histories of the 19th century as ‘history’ or tantara.
This word – just like the English-language term ‘history’, is a complex bundle
of concepts. Tantara in 19th-century Madagascar included textual sources
and oral narratives, as well as standing stones and other monuments. But it
also referred to ongoing traditions and practices, handed down to the living
from the dead. History could be seen in the landscape, but that space of
experience also included the actions through which the living reproduced the
past and maintained its contemporaneity. This, then, is a notion of history as
something experienced and lived as much as written and recorded. History
was found in tradition and custom, in ceremonies and stories. It might seem
that more or less anything could be history under these terms, but there was
another important way in which tantara could be translated, and this was as
‘privilege’ (Delivré 1974, 164; 1979). To have history was to have privilege,
and to see the evidence of one’s past manifest in the landscape. It was also to
have the privilege to expect continuity into the future, reproduced by one’s
descendants, who would care for the dead and interact with them at the site
of the ancestral tomb. This privilege was also made visible by the destruction
of history that took place when people were enslaved. Captives from raids,
criminals, debtors and many others were enslaved and in the process had
their ancestral land and tombs taken from them. Having no ancestral tomb,
the enslaved were lost to history. This was a deliberate erasure of history
by those with political might; the enslaved were excluded from the ‘space of
experience’ of their ancestral past and from the ‘horizon of possibility’ for

future continuation of their lineage. History existed in the past, but also in the
privilege of reproduction and in the ongoing traditions that it made. These
could be traditions of narration or of reading, but could also be understood
through habitual and quotidian practices – of walking, eating, gathering,
building, commemorating and so on.
Lucas’s call for an archaeology ‘in the mode of the contemporary’ is at
heart a call for better attention to the relationships – temporal and otherwise
– between objects, people and historical narrative. As he observes, what is
needed is the development of a more sophisticated theory that will allow
us to identify different kinds of temporal relationship and consider how
they operate in different modes. The Allen operators that Lucas mentions in
passing sound a promising line to pursue and I am keen to hear more about
how these might play out in an archaeological case study. Another approach
to thinking through temporal–material relations is through the dynamics of
semeiotic processes – or semeiosis – as developed from the writings of Charles
Sanders Peirce. This is a semeiotic theory that differs fundamentally from the
more familiar Continental semiotics (hence the different spelling), one which
allows us to construct a theory of material–semeiotic relations that operate
in the world and in time. To explore this briefly, I would like to turn to the
multiple meanings of the English-language term ‘history’ and to explore how
it operates as a changeable and varying semeiotic process. This, I hope, will
resonate with Lucas’s discussion of the contemporary.
When we use the term ‘history’, we can mean at least three different things.
First, history can refer to historical sources: archives, oral histories, national
heritage and archaeological finds. These are the traces – or signs – through
which history is known and written. Historical narrative, or history-as-
representation, constitutes the second sense of history. It is perhaps this aspect
which most concerns Lucas, at least in this paper. How is the past written,
and how are the relationships between objects defined and conceived relative
to each other and to the historian–archaeologist? From a highland Malagasy
perspective, we might broaden this second sense of history to include all the
contemporary practices and traditions through which the signs of history
are interpreted. This is to say that history can be experienced affectively
and energetically as well as through textual practices of representation.
These modes of history-making include not only obvious interpretive sites
like museums and national monuments, but also more mundane interpretive
practices such as driving along an old turnpike road, or walking the Fosse
Way. Equally, affective moods and responses are also forms of history-making
from this semeiotic perspective. The feeling of recognition when presented
with a forgotten toy from one’s childhood is an affective state that interprets
an object relative to a past, but without necessarily bringing it into narrative
form.
Third, to speak of history can be to discuss the disappeared past –
history-as-event in the parlance of conceptual history – but also, as Lucas
indicates, broader practices, beliefs and processes. Our understanding of this
history is mediated through history-as-trace – whether through objects that
persist into the contemporary world, or through more intangible practices
and traditions. We must always start with the signs of history – whether

20 discussion
these are material traces like pottery or visible absences like the tombs of
those enslaved in highland Madagascar. So to summarize, history-as-trace
brings us into relation with history-as-past – with other people, with other
objects and places – and this relationship is recognized through history-as-
interpreting-acts, which may be affective, gestural or representational, among
other possibilities.
This, then, is a question of semeiotic traces – material or otherwise – in
so far as they are experienced and understood in the present, and reach
into the past and future. Along these lines, Lucas’s paper encourages me to
think about modes of persistence along multiple axes. There are modes of
interpretive persistence through which the traces of history are understood
affectively and through material and representational practices, some of which
are projected into an indefinite future. We can also think through the modes
of persistence of material traces, by inquiring into their being as signs, and
as material things. Finally, we can ask about the nature of the relationships
between such traces and the pasts that we understand them to show us. The
objects of the past may be experienced only at a perceptual level, as part of
the background of everyday life. Or they may be elaborated upon in narrative
or through museological structures. But insofar as they tell us about history in
some way they are always situated in an unfolding relation. History unfolds
because every narrative or gesture has the potential to become another trace
of the past, and in so doing to direct attention away from other semeiotic
possibilities.
There is much more that could be said here, particularly in relation to
consociality and the question of how we are brought into relation with
the dead through their traces. Equally, the question of past futures is an
important issue, with much to explore around the question of the anticipated
response that was folded into past practices. Geoffrey Scarre (2006) notes
that it is possible to affect the dead relationally, by acting upon their
posthumous reputation. When the tombs of highland Madagascar were
forcibly abandoned, this was designed to have an effect on the dead contained
within them as much as on the living. These were people who had lived and
died with an expectation that they would be respected and remembered.
Slavery acted to devalue them posthumously, and to deny them the care
that they had anticipated. This in turn damaged the future of the living. The
destruction of tombs acted on the present-past and the future, and in so doing
denied contemporaneity to the dead.
Coming back to the question of an archaeology of the contemporary as
proposed by Lucas, it is clear that this is a particularly rich chronotopic
orientation for writing the past, and one that is consonant with the broader
interest in contemporaneity as an alternative to the tropes of modernity.
I find the concept to be stimulating and productive, and think that it
could be usefully developed to encompass more than the relations between
archaeological objects and subjects. In this I see great potential for productive
conversations with semeiotic approaches. However, I would also emphasize
that room needs to be found to take proper account of those excluded from
history and contemporaneity, and to allow for full recognition of different
chronotopic configurations in the past.

Assemblages, relationality and recursivity 21

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000045
Assemblages, relationality and recursivity. Comments on

‘Archaeology and contemporaneity’
∗
by Gavin Lucas
Andrew Meirion Jones
I warmly welcome Gavin Lucas’s discussion of time and contemporaneity.

I view this as another component of a sustained (and much-needed)
investigation of the ontological character of archaeology. Gavin Lucas is
presently at the forefront of this line of enquiry. His analysis is much more
than an exploration of the ontology of archaeology. It is also a radical
rethinking of the basis of the discipline. His analysis takes us back to
‘first principles’ and reveals unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions.
Excitingly, his discussion touches upon the very basis of archaeological
chronologies and archaeological stratigraphies, and forces us to think about
them afresh. Worsaae, Montelius, Childe: these figures stalk the pages of
elementary textbooks on archaeology, yet Lucas’s analysis allows us not only
to appreciate their analytical skills, but also to rethink and question them.
I particularly appreciate the fact that his analysis takes us beyond the
arid observation that the past is a contemporary phenomenon, often used as
the excuse for postmodern flim-flam and intellectual hand-wringing. Rather
than being an intellectual problem that prevents analysis of the past, Lucas
demonstrates that the contemporaneity of the past has been recognized since
the 19th-century origins of the discipline, often in terms of anachronism. In
fact, he demonstrates that the issue of contemporaneity lies at the heart of
archaeology.
One of the clear insights that emerges from Lucas’s analysis of the
question of contemporaneity and the archaeological record is the point
that relationality is central to the analysis of archaeological chronologies.
This is interesting as the history of archaeological chronology begins with
building relative chronologies and then shifts in the radiocarbon era to
building absolute chronologies. We have been living in the era of absolute
chronologies for at least half a century now, and have experienced several
radiocarbon revolutions, the most recent of which claims to provide ever-
tighter chronologies by linking radiocarbon dates to Bayesian statistical
analysis. While radiocarbon dating has improved our understanding of
absolute chronologies immensely, it has also presented us with a past
composed of discrete packets of time, a succession of time, though accurately
measured. Each of these successive periods of time is then occupied by
synchronic relationships. One of the outcomes of this view of time is that
archaeological perennial: the study of transitions. As soon as we define
chronological periods as a series of successions we are required to explain
the transition between them. Archaeological careers have been built on the
∗ Andrew Meirion Jones, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, England.

Email: [email protected].

22 discussion
study of transitions of this kind between distinct units of time, perhaps the
most obvious being the transition between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic
– the so-called agricultural revolution – though we could also include the
transition from feudalism to capitalism or the emergence of anatomically
modern humans to the list of well-worn transition debates.
Yet we all know (but don’t care to admit) that this model of time is an
archaeological fiction. In fact, the archaeological record is composed of a
series of different relationships. Simply analysing archaeological relationships
in terms of synchronicity or anachronism is a narrowing of the possible
relationships between archaeological entities that can take place. Neatly,
and carefully, Lucas demonstrates the importance of contemporaneity to
archaeological analysis, both at the level of the reconstruction of site
chronologies and in terms of consociality: the set of associative relationships
that pertain between things. Interestingly, Lucas’s work builds on the growing
body of research on memory in archaeology, all of which likewise recognizes
that relations of contemporaneity (and, in particular, consociality) are crucial
to understanding memory. Whether, like Olivier (2001; 2011), we recognize
the contemporaneity of a series of architectural forms and artefacts or describe
these relations of contemporaneity in terms of citation (Jones 2007) or
temporal percolation (Witmore 2006), Lucas shows that the study of memory
in archaeology is simply the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in identifying the significance
of contemporaneity. In fact, relations of contemporaneity lie at the heart of
the discipline; it is a condition of the study of archaeology.
Lucas emphasizes relationality in his analysis of relations of
contemporaneity. This is especially important. Relational approaches in
archaeology have mainly been discussed as a development of postprocessual
approaches, and have characteristically been associated with hunter-gatherer
ontologies (Watts 2013; Hill 2012). There is nothing wrong with this, though
this is a very narrow reading of relationality. If we are to acknowledge the
truly relational character of archaeology, the ramifications are immense. A
number of authors have already begun to delineate the relational character
of the discipline (Fowler 2013; Lucas 2012; Alberti and Bray 2009; Alberti,
Jones and Pollard 2013). The genius of Lucas’s approach here is that he shows
us that relational relationships occur at various stages of the interpretative
process. They occur as we establish the contemporaneity of excavated features
just as they occur as we grapple with the relations of contemporaneity between
the things we have excavated and ourselves. To consider contemporaneity
is to consider the relational character of archaeology at all levels of
investigation. Importantly, this approach differs radically from processual
and postprocessual approaches in which we observe a disjuncture between
the methods of archaeological excavation and the application of theory to
the analysis of the features and artefacts excavated. Instead, Lucas offers
us the possibility of a seamless approach to both excavation recording and
post-excavation analysis and interpretation, achieving the kind of procedural
equivalence between the theories we deploy and the worlds we produce argued
for by Ben Alberti and colleagues (Alberti et al. 2011, 905).
Lucas offers us the possibility of an exciting future for archaeology.
Rather than facing a future dominated by yet more micro-measurement of

Assemblages, relationality and recursivity 23
chronologies using various radiometric dating techniques, the discipline will

instead begin to focus its energies on defining and analysing different kinds of
relationship. How these relationships are variously assembled says something
about the changing character of the archaeological record. Thinking of the
archaeological record as so many assemblages to be understood, disentangled
and reassembled offers an active role for the archaeological theorist (both
Fowler (2013) and Lucas (2012) show that the archaeologist is an active
component of the archaeological record) and refashions archaeology as
the ‘science of assemblages’. As a ‘science of assemblages’, archaeology
may begin to offer a methodological and theoretical lead to other cognate
disciplines, both in the humanities and in the sciences. In that sense, Lucas’s
analysis of relations of contemporaneity offers the possibility of the kind of
recursive analysis discussed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2013) and Martin
Holbraad (2012) in anthropology, i.e. an analysis that not only illuminates
the particular (in this case archaeological chronological relationships), but
also bleeds through to illuminate and affect the discipline as a whole.
Added to this, Lucas’s work on chronological relationships resonates with
the recent call by John Robb and Tim Pauketat, in the edited volume Big
histories, human lives (2013), for an increased focus on scale and in particular
on history, something they rightly note has been overlooked in postprocessual
archaeology. Contributors to the volume, including Clive Gamble (2013)
and Tim Pauketat (2013), argue for a relational and networked approach
to the issue of scale. The most profitable analysis of these issues comes
from Pauketat’s discussion of North American practices of bundling (or
assembling). He discusses differing types of bundling practice from Aztec,
Hopewell and Puebloan contexts as bundles of, in and as time. Pauketat’s
analysis is based on an understanding of relationality. Bundles are composed
of a series of relations, and these can in turn be bundled together and attached
to further bundles to carry forward historical change. One of the aspects that
is lacking from Pauketat’s discussion is a thoroughgoing analysis of types
of relation. It strikes me that the detailed analysis of chronological relations
that Lucas outlines here would benefit the kind of large-scale analysis of
history as a series of bundled relationships offered by Pauketat. The approach
Lucas takes here begins by discussing relations of contemporaneity during
excavation and then goes on to discuss consociality at a slightly greater scale
of analysis. Does Lucas feel that he would wish to stop his analysis there,
or can his analytical methods be extended to greater scales of analysis (such
as those entertained by Pauketat)? It seems from his analysis of relations of
consociality that he would be prepared to extend these relations over quite
some temporal range. Is there a temporal point where the network can no
longer hold, or becomes cut, and, if so, what is it?
I really like the notion of consociality, and in particular Lucas’s coopting of
the term to an ANT perspective: a consociality of people and things extended
through time. However, the issue of gradiency bothers me. In introducing
this term, are we not in danger of returning to a successional view of time
in which we measure time by its gradiency, or degrees of separation from
its consociate? I would like to see this point expanded. How does gradiency
relate to time? Is a gradient always atemporal?

24 discussion
Throughout the paper contemporaneity is taken as a given. Things persist

or perdure over time. This is what allows them to be cotemporaneous. This
lends a slight asymmetry to the final analysis of consociality. Lucas ends the
paper by arguing that ‘gradients of reciprocity will change between objects as
some objects either cease to exist or subsist weakly in a distributed manner’
(p. 12). Is this not a view of relationality from the perspective of the subject
rather than the object? How do we account for material perdurance and
ephemerality? Should we also account for practices of maintenance and
repair? Is material perdurance purely the result of continued relations of
consociality or do we need to factor the differing properties of material
substances into models of consociality and contemporaneity? I would like
to see this point developed.
Finally, I would like to thank both Gavin and the editors of Archaeological
dialogues for the opportunity to comment on this paper. Although I was a
member of the audience at the Southampton seminar at which this paper
was given, the significance of the argument was not apparent until I sat and
carefully engaged with the written paper. I hope that from my comments it is
obvious that I think this is a crucially important paper discussing a topic that
is fundamental to the discipline. It is precisely the kind of topic we should be
debating, and it deserves to be widely read and discussed.

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000057
Existential contemporaneity. Or what we as

∗
archaeologists can
learn from Archie Leach Håkan Karlsson
Introduction
From my point of view, discussions of the content of the concept of time
are always welcome in archaeology since the archaeological discourse on
this topic has for many years been anchored in a quite simplified and
axiomatic chronological approach. Discussions of other aspects of, and
approaches towards, the concept of time have – with few exceptions – been
neglected. It is therefore with pleasure that I have been presented with the
opportunity to comment briefly on Gavin Lucas’s article ‘Archaeology and
contemporaneity’, which approaches the concept of contemporaneity in and
of the archaeological record. I would like to start this comment in a rather
unorthodox way with a brief quotation from the movie A Fish Called Wanda1
since I think this quotation encapsulates both my agreement with, and my
critique of, the reasonings presented by Lucas:
Archie: Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being
so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong
thing, of saying to someone, ‘Are you married?’ and hearing, ‘My wife left
∗ Håkan Karlsson, Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg,
Sweden. Email: [email protected].

Existential contemporaneity 25
me this morning,’ or saying, uh, ‘Do you have children?’ and being told they
all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we’re all terrified of
embarrassment. That’s why we’re so – dead. Most of my friends are dead,
you know; we’ve these piles of corpses to dinner. But you’re alive, God bless
you, and I want to be, I’m so fed up with all this (A Fish Called Wanda, 1988)
It may be concluded from the quotation above that the time horizons of
past, present and future are interconnected and intertwined in Archie’s
and Wanda’s contemporaneity. At least Archie is heavily influenced by the
past and its traditions, and his contemporary situation is grounded in the
past as well as in the future, when he is trying to break free and direct
himself towards a new future. Thus Archie’s fictional life is a blueprint of
the conditions of our own existences where past, present and future are
inseparable and interconnected in a manner where they cannot be divided
into separate chronological time horizons. I will return to this observation
and to Archie and Wanda further on, but I believe that Lucas agrees with
my initial observation concerning the relationship between past, present and
future as inseparable and blended entities – this, since his article approaches
the concept of time and contemporaneity in and of the archaeological record
in a thought-provoking and inspiring manner.
Lucas and contemporaneity

In his article, Lucas focuses on a discussion of the concept of contemporaneity
as used in archaeology today, in relation to dating and chronology (synchron-
ism), and he is straightforward in his disclosure of the shortcomings of our
present use of the concept. Lucas’s critique of the traditional archaeological
manner of using a linear model of time is convincing as it focuses on
chronology and the definition of contemporaneity as the relation between the
archaeological record and a unit of time, and I agree in total with the presented
critique. This circumstance is also valid for the critique of the common use of
subjectivity and analogy as elements in the interpretation of the archaeological
record, and the understanding of the archaeological record solely as a
contemporary phenomenon (anachronism). This is so since subjectivity and
analogy also fulfil a function when making contemporaneity a question of
belonging to a certain unit or stretch of time. According to Lucas, both these
conventional archaeological usages of the concept of contemporaneity lead to
a situation where we adopt a simplified view of the concept and its content,
either as synchronism or as anachronism, since contemporaneity is defined as
a relation either to a unit of time or to a stretch of time.
Lucas proposes that we rethink the concept of contemporaneity in such a
manner that the concept and its definition are principally about the temporal
relations between things, rather than between things and an abstract measure
of time. For Lucas, this does not imply an abandonment of the use of dating
and chronology as tools, but rather that we shift our focus in a manner
where chronology is relative to the temporality of, and the relationship
between, the objects investigated. In his presented approach, which he
anchors partly in the reasonings concerning persistence in Henri Bergson
(1991) and Edmund Husserl (1966), this implies that we need to abandon

26 discussion
synchronism and anachronism and the traditional linear and successional

view of time. This means, for instance, not that the contemporaneity of
the archaeological record is about its existence in our present, but that its
contemporaneity instead consists of its interconnection and intertwining of
past, present and future. When trying to develop a more complex concept of
contemporaneity of the archaeological record, Lucas approaches the writings
of Alfred Schutz (1967) and his concept of consociality. Lucas redefines this
concept to fit the reasonings concerning the relationship between things and
their persistence and he does so in a convincing way. Lucas clearly shows
that the archaeological record cannot be isolated into time horizons of past,
present and future, but that it instead interconnects and intertwines these
horizons in both interesting and thought-provoking ways. Thus the concept
of consociation is offered as a fruitful way to think of our articulation of the
idea of contemporaneity. Lucas stresses that we may use this concept to think
about how we articulate the idea of contemporaneity both in our narratives
of the past and in our comprehension of the relation between ourselves and
what remains of the past. According to Lucas this is important
because of the consequences it has for how we represent the past and its
relation to the present. One of the most important of these consequences,
I would suggest, is related to the temporal voice we use in archaeological
narratives. We need to write in archaeology in the mode of the contemporary
. . . [A] narrative written in the contemporary mode is one which is
attendant to the changing interplay between present, past and future tense
(p. 14).
On a general level, I agree with the arguments presented by Lucas. This is also
the case when it comes to the multi-subject and multi-temporal archaeology he
proposes as a possible outcome of the reasonings and arguments presented in
the article. However, I would also like to add a point of critique that perhaps
may develop and/or radicalize the arguments presented even further. I would
argue that there are other, more profound, consequences to be found in the
arguments and conclusions presented by Lucas. If we as archaeologists try to
abandon synchronism and anachronism as well as the traditional linear and
successional view of time, the outcome cannot solely be a situation where we
‘need to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary’ (p. 14), as
proposed by Lucas. Of course, we need to stress the changing interconnection
between past, present and future in our writings, as much as we need to reflect
on the relation between ourselves and what remains of the past. However –
and this is perhaps even more important – I believe that we also need to reflect
on our own existential temporality in the same way as Archie Leach is doing.
In short, why just write about contemporaneity? Why not live it?
An existential twist
At this point, it is time to return briefly to the quotation presented in the
introduction of my comment and to the contemporaneity of Archie Leach
and Wanda Gershwitz. As already stressed, their lives are past, present and
future simultaneously since these horizons are interconnected and intertwined
in their existential temporality, as well as in Archie’s wish to break with the

Existential contemporaneity 27
past and create a new future. With Archie and Wanda in mind it may be
fruitful to add some existential arguments from Martin Heidegger to the
discussion. According to Heidegger, the division of time into constructed
isolated horizons, such as past, present and future, and the view of time as
objective, linear, endless and independent, is extremely simplified. Instead,
he stresses that these horizons ought to be characterized as ‘the character
of having been’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future as approaching’, since they are
interwoven – and affect each other – in our temporal existence in a manner
where they cannot be separated or isolated from each other (Heidegger 1927,
350; Karlsson 1998). Heidegger apprehended temporality as a horizon of
our understanding of ourselves, as well as the horizon of our understanding
of all other human beings and of the things that surround us. In short, if it
were not for our temporality we would not be able to orientate ourselves in
the world. Thus Heidegger stresses that existential temporality precedes all
forms of reckoning and division of time in any clear-cut horizons, whether
those are minutes or decades, past, present or future. These horizons are just
reflections of our existential temporality that conceals the existential nature of
time and its dependency upon our existential temporality. In accordance with
Heidegger, Western thought has been dominated by an understanding of time
as measurable ‘datability’ that conceals our existential temporality (ibid.).
Furthermore, Heidegger stresses that in our existence we are always
ahead of ourselves, since our projects are directed towards ‘the future as
approaching’, or more precisely towards ourselves and our possibilities since
we are always incomplete (Heidegger 1927, 325 ff.; Karlsson 1998). This is
exactly what Archie is up to. With his existential anchorage in the traditions
deriving from the past as ‘the character of having been’, his contemporaneity
as ‘the present’ is already directed towards the future as ‘the future as
approaching’. He is trying to break free from the traditions he has been
born into but this is not so easily done: he is terrified of embarrassment but
at the same time he is fed up. According to Heidegger, the sociocultural and
historical tradition that we are thrown into has both positive and negative
dimensions. The tradition may act negatively in a situation where it keeps us
from our future possibilities in the form of das Man.2 According to Heidegger,
das Man prescribes our state of mind and determines what and how we see,
think and interpret the world (Heidegger 1927, 126 ff., 146 ff.). Thus tradition
through das Man creates a restricted world that excludes the possibility
of being challenged by the unfamiliar and the alien. However, tradition
can also act positively and let us open up to our (future) possibilities, as
reflections upon the alternate modes of understanding derived from historical
existence provide us with the possibility of counteracting the closure of das
Man and viewing the world in a new light (ibid., 328 ff.). Here, Heidegger
is undoubtedly inspired by Søren Kierkegaard, especially when he stresses
anxiety as an important element in our state of mind. In a state of anxiety,
the world and ourselves, according to Heidegger, lose their meaning and, as
a consequence, it becomes clear that the interpretation of the world in which
we exist is just one interpretation among other possible interpretations. This
implies that in anxiety we can project ourselves towards new possibilities and
towards a new understanding of the world (ibid., 184–92). I do not know

28 discussion
whether or not Archie derives the inspiration for his future possibilities in das
Man, in his historically directed reflection or in a state of anxiety. The main
point to be made here is that his projection towards (a possible) new future
is a consequence of his existential temporality.
Existential contemporaneity
In my opinion the arguments and conclusions presented by Lucas in his article
can be developed further and more radically if we also take into account the
existential dimensions of temporality as presented by Heidegger and as I have
discussed briefly above. If not prevented by das Man in our archaeological
traditions, a move towards an acceptance of our existential temporality can
produce a situation that leads to more radical consequences than solely
to the writing of texts, which present the insights of contemporaneity
and temporality. Rather, they could lead to existential changes due to
the realization of the conditions for our own contemporary existence, and
for the discipline of archaeology. But what does it mean to live one’s
contemporaneity? In such a state, it is obvious that archaeological existence
and archaeology become something more than solely a search for a more
or less fictional objective understanding of prehistory, or a presentation
of sociopolitically anchored subjective interpretations of the past. Rather,
archaeology, with such an approach, would become an individual as well
as a collective existential project containing philosophical as well as critical
dimensions that approach, for instance, what it means to be human, or more
precisely what it means to be human in a socially unequal and unfair world.
In this respect I argue that we, as individual archaeologists, as well as the
archaeological discipline, could learn something from Archie Leach and his
existential contemporaneity and the conditions it presents for his attempt to
achieve a changed existence in ‘the future as approaching’.
Notes
1 Charles Crichton and John Cleese wrote the script of the film, and the film was directed
by Crichton and produced by MGM in 1988. It starred, amongst others, John Cleese as
Archie Leach and Jamie Lee Curtis as Wanda Gershwitz.
2 The German term das Man refers to the ‘levelling-out’, the ‘ought’ or the ‘must’ tendencies
of social reality. I use this term untranslated, because of the lack of an English term that
renders the content of the German term clearly enough.

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000069
∗
Archaeology and contemporaneousness Laurent Olivier
Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long
interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology.
For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The
∗ Laurent Olivier, National Museum of Archaeology, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. Email:
[email protected].

Archaeology and contemporaneousness 29
First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered
contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period
of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and
influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of
chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object
or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate
the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the
actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a
probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.
Dating artefacts or features moreover requires chronological markers that
are relatively precise, and on most digs they are simply lacking. This was
demonstrated again this past summer in Marsal, in Lorraine, when we
excavated a pit silo dug into salt production waste materials that contained
many pottery shards from the 6th century B.C. Eight human bodies had been
tossed into this pit before it was finally filled in. The layer of filling covering
the bodies contained pottery and metallic fragments dating from the end of
the 6th century B.C. to the first quarter of the 5th. We naturally assumed that
the bodies dated from the same period, or perhaps slightly after. Then we
got the radiocarbon dating results for the skeletons, which all belonged to a
period between 400 and 200 Cal. B.C. The pottery shards and small metallic
debris that had been mixed in with the filling certainly dated to the end of
the Early Iron Age, but they were still there in the ground when the bodies
were thrown in during the fourth or third century B.C. In other words, these
material remains were contemporary with that traumatic event even though
they were in no way related to it. Historical time – the time of what happened
– is the time of events, whereas archaeological time, which is the time of
matter – pottery shards, bone fragments, pieces of metal – deals in lengths
of time. Events vanish once they are over; not so pottery shards or bone
fragments. They remain long after they were made or used.
Given this observation, what can be done? How can we know if
archaeological remains are truly related to each other – that is, truly
contemporary in historical terms? Gavin would have us draw on Alfred
Schutz’s notion of consociality, which defines, to put it roughly, the relation
between people and the things around them. But isn’t this just another way of
trying to (re)introduce history into matter – I mean, of course, archaeological
matter – that is fundamentally alien to it? Archaeological matter does not
conform to the time of historical events. Its future is always just the reworking
of what is old, of what is ‘already there’, along with its reshaping in every
present that follows. And simply because ‘they’re there’, things are often
brought back into play in untimely fashion. That is why archaeology is far
better understood as a memory of the past than as the story of ‘what happened
there’. Why, then, don’t we acknowledge this? Why do we persist in trying to
make archaeological remains speak to us as if they were historical documents?
As Gavin reminds us, archaeological matter is multi-temporal in that all these
objects and features that were created at different times coexist in our present,
as they did, by the way, in each present after their creation. The future is not
just made of things that are newly created, but rather of the infinite plasticity
of the past, of its open-ended potential to become something else, even as it

30 discussion
brings its heritage forward. In fact, the future is the transformation of the
past, and in that archaeology offers a ‘reading of the past’ that is completely
different from traditional history. Why not just come out and say so?
Therefore Gavin shows us that certain seemingly obvious concepts, in
particular contemporaneousness, have actually changed over time. In the
1860s, when archaeology was flourishing in Europe, there were people living
in the Americas and Australia very much as mankind had lived in the Stone
Age. To travel from 19th-century London or Paris into the Welsh or the
Breton countryside was to leave an industrial metropolis for a remote rural
world where lifestyles and mentalities had changed very little from how they
had been 200 or 300 years before. The past existed like an ocean of surviving
practices surrounding small islands of modernity with steam-powered engines
and public transport systems. That is probably why scholars, at that time,
believed comparative approaches to be a powerful tool for reconstituting the
distant past: they had only to look around to see that the most ancient ways
were still out there, just beyond the gates of the modern world. This is not at all
the way we view things today. Our experience of the world has dramatically
changed. In an age of Facebook and Twitter, contemporaneousness is a form
of simultaneity. We find ourselves in a single present, with individual moments
simultaneously experienced all over the world. We are now cut off from the
past, which is more and more removed from us, whereas in the 19th century
the present bore the full weight of the past.
The way in which we order time has changed, or rather, ‘the regimes of
historicity’ (régimes d’historicité), as the historian François Hartog (2002)
phrases it, have been transformed. Our relation to the past is no longer the
same. Following the French Revolution, historians believed that reason would
lead mankind towards progress and the emancipation of peoples everywhere.
But that view came undone in France with the advent of the First Empire,
the return of monarchical rule, the outbreak of new revolutions, and then
the ephemeral return to a republic just before a Second Empire took over.
Clearly, history didn’t lead anywhere. It did not, as people had thought, pave
the way for the future. After the middle of the 19th century, the events of
the past related by history were seen as a relic, a dead thing that had just
happened once. It was now obvious that mankind never learned anything
from the failures of the past. History was just one instance after another of
the strong dominating the weak in different ways. Marxism gained favor by
feeding on our disillusionment and on the hope it offered of giving history new
meaning, or at least some direction, thanks to the notion of ‘class struggle’.
The ‘terrible 20th century’ taught us that this, too, was an illusion.
Thereafter, the terrible shock of the mechanized slaughter of the FirstWorld
War, followed by Europe’s moral collapse after the Second World War,
definitively severed whatever ties still linked the present to the past. Today,
the recent past of the 20th century is something that, overall in Europe, we
would rather forget, and by which we prefer not to define ourselves. As for
the future, it seems to hover over us like a vague threat, and we now live our
lives in that ‘risk society’ whose workings have been so thoroughly described
by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2001). We live in anticipation of
catastrophy, in ‘the Final Age’, having retreated into a permanent present

Archaeology, anthropology and the stuff of time 31
that moves along without ever moving on (Anders 2007). The repressed past
has not ceased ‘haunting’ the present as if it were still current, as if it had never
ended (Hamel 2006). We are living a period of ‘latency’ that has not been able
to take its place in history, one that seems doomed to keep on repeating itself
in the present (Gumbrecht 2013). This overwhelming, never-ending, absolute
present is that of the globalized, overcapitalized world that flourished from
the end of the 20th century.
Our thinking is shaped by that world. In other words, we cannot conceive
our relation to the past and to the present independently of the way in which
we exist in the world historically. It is our experience of the world, as that
world is given to us, which fashions our understanding of the phenomena we
observe. That relation is basically ideological, yet ideology is strangely absent
in the works of scholars who deal with matters of archaeological ontology,
especially North American scholars. But we can’t make ideology disappear
by pretending that it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary, by acting as if it does
not matter, we confer on it the force of a given, something that doesn’t have
to be questioned. And in doing so, we unknowingly become its spokesperson.
In the end, the only question truly asked of us is this: do we consider
archaeology to be a field of speculative reflection that has no impact on the
world, or do we deem the way we conceive archaeology to be inseparable
from our attempts to change things, or at least to free our minds of the
assumptions and preconceived notions that fetter our thinking? I obviously
subscribe to the latter view. If thought does not serve to relieve us of the
pressures of ideology and convention, then it necessarily maintains us in a
state of subjugation and dependence. Worse still, it makes us instruments
for reproducing social norms. For, as Michel Foucault noted, we now live
in a society in which power expresses itself as normalcy, ‘which implies an
altogether different kind of surveillance and checks that involves maintaining
constant visibility, categorizing individuals, establishing a hierarchy, labeling,
setting limits, and identifying types. The social norm has become the social
divide’, he wrote (Foucault 1994, 75). And that is why it is so important for
us to think deeply, as Gavin urges us to do, about matters that deal with our
relation to the past, for they have a natural tendency to slip into the mould
of normalized concepts, such as contemporaneousness.

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000070
∗
Archaeology, anthropology and the stuff of time Thomas Yarrow
Lucas’s discussion of contemporaneity makes an important contribution to

archaeological understandings of chronology and dating and to broader
debates about temporality. Extending his earlier work on time (Buchli
and Lucas 2001; Lucas 2001; 2005), Lucas’s central insight is that
∗ Thomas Yarrow, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, England. Email:

[email protected].

32 discussion
contemporaneity is not a function of a shared unit of time but of the specific

relations through which objects are imbricated. The approach is likely to have
profound implications for archaeological approaches to chronology. Whether
or not it undermines the current preoccupation with absolute dating, it should
certainly give renewed impetus to those branches of archaeology that make
it possible to examine time as a matter of the specific material properties of
artefacts. This is important, first, because it opens up the possibility of more
nuanced empirical understanding of the very stuff of time (literally how it
is materially manifest) and, second, because such empirical understandings
enable conceptual refinement and extension of the categories through which
time is understood. Of broader interest for non-archaeological readers are the
ramifications of this discussion of contemporaneity for the ways in which time
is investigated and conceptualized. Writing as an anthropologist, interested
but with no expertise in archaeological dating, it is these latter considerations
that I want to pursue in my comments, as these relate to contemporaneity
and to the broader investigation of time.
Lucas’s move to situate contemporaneity as a relative property of the
objects of investigation opens up the possibility of an archaeology that is
of rather than simply in time. Rather than an external determining system
(what Lucas terms the ‘envelope’ concept), time is a product of the relations
between things and is therefore contingent and relative to the object(s) of
investigation. In an influential paper in this journal, Ingold (2007) argues for a
shift from materiality to materials, suggesting that a focus on material culture
was accompanied by a generic concern with the material world, entailing a
dualistic opposition to (immaterial) society, and foreclosing attention to the
actual, specific and processual properties of materials. I read Lucas’s paper as a
parallel move, insofar as this urges a shift away from universal understandings
of temporality as an abstract, determining principle (independent of people
and place) to the actual, specific and multiple ways in which time is produced;
time against temporality, to paraphrase Ingold, is materially and socially
situated, emergent rather than pre-given as a universal organizing principle.
This theoretical move resonates with recent anthropological discussions
of time on a number of levels. While temporality has been a long-standing
focus of anthropological interest, at least from the time of Evans-Pritchard,
recent commentators have pointed to the ways in which anthropological
models and methods internalize assumptions about time, to the detriment of
empirical investigation of the actual relations and understandings through
which time is constituted. Informed in part by post-human thinking, this
entails a move from the study of socially constructed representations of
time to an understanding of time as a distributed property of the relations
between people and things as they interact in practice (Bear 2014; Ingold
2010). In terms that echo Lucas’s, this approach proposes that the situated
investigation of these temporal practices conditions the analytic framework
rather than vice versa (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2013). Theoretically speaking,
new temporal understandings are continually extended and reconfigured
through ethnographic encounters with temporal contexts that, in their
specificity, call for conceptual refinement. New theories of time are produced
through taking seriously the specificity of these ethnographic articulations. If

time is always something different – differently specified in different situations

– then its conceptual implications are always, recursively, a challenge to
theoretical models derived from elsewhere. Rabinow’s influential calls for
an anthropology of the contemporary in some ways echo Lucas’s approach
in this paper, suggesting that we approach this not as an analytic or
methodological given but as ‘an assemblage of both old and new elements
and their interactions and interfaces’, as ‘a moving ratio of modernity, moving
through the recent past and near future in a (non-linear) space’ (Rabinow and
Stavrianakis 2014, 142).
These resonances might lead us to imagine disciplinary convergence,
specifically in an approach to time that, in attending to articulations of
people and things, collapses any straightforward conceptual separation
between its social and material determinants. Indeed, attempts to elucidate
the temporality of materials and the materiality of time represent an exciting
arena of mutual interest, if not as yet much collaborative research, across
archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines (Ingold 2010). However, if
time is a relative property of practical interactions, indissolubly social and
material, then Lucas’s account itself makes clear how disciplinary traditions
of fieldwork and analysis (re)produce their own temporal frameworks, as
much as they can be used to understand the temporal logics inherent in the
practices of others. Insofar as what we know about time relates to how we
know about it, time matters to archaeology and anthropology in literally
different ways.
As Lucas highlights, chronology creates various issues for archaeologists:
insofar as contemporaneity becomes a matter of temporal coincidence,
attention to processually unfolding relations is foreshortened. Ethnographic
methods also routinely engender and reproduce assumptions about
contemporaneity but in rather different ways. Dalsgaard and Nielsen (2013)
have recently highlighted how, notwithstanding the turn to multi-sited
ethnography, anthropological definitions and demarcations of the field as
a temporally bounded unit foreclose attention to the multiple temporalities at
play as unfolding properties of interactions in the field. From the perspective
of the ‘ethnographic present’, time is effectively collapsed into place, even as
conceptions of place are distributed and extended to encompass non-localized
processes. If time poses problems of different kinds for archaeologists and
anthropologists, then these disciplines also create different kinds of ‘solution’,
insofar as different interpretive and methodological practices create different
interpretive artefacts.
I read Lucas’s discussion of contemporaneity not only as a critique of the
temporal assumptions embedded in prevailing archaeological approaches,
but also as a more positive explication and amplification of existing
archaeological disposition. His account makes clear a latent capacity of
archaeological research to unfold time from the material properties of
artefacts and the ways in which they are spatially related. The question
whether and how things are contemporary is thus a matter of empirical
investigation. Lucas and others have elsewhere made evident through
discussions of the ‘contemporary past’ how, regardless of the object of
investigation, the archaeological method inheres in sustained empirical

34 discussion
attention to the physical properties of things. Archaeological orientations

to these questions are not just a matter of theoretical perspective but of
the distinctively embodied ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) – methodologies
practically embodied as sensibilities, dispositions, ways of interacting,
knowing and seeing. Archaeology, thus conceived, is less a practice of putting
things in temporal context than of making time out of things. In relation to
the current discussion, this means that time is made visible through space, and
hence materials are methodologically prior to time. Such a perspective helps
locate the limits of the kinds of contextualizing move that anthropologists
routinely engage in.
Lucas’s reformulated vision of archaeological contemporaneity makes
clear, by contrast, the materially and temporally reductive consequences of a
commitment to the ethnographic present, and foregrounds a broader problem
latent in a range of sociological perspectives. Even where the temporal
horizon is extended to embrace past and future, these emerge after the
fact of the primary object of attention: methods and analytic concepts that
privilege contemporary social relations and interests, and locate past and
present as various kinds of projection from this, whether conceived in terms
of temporal ‘imaginations’, ‘representations’ or ‘memories’. The past as a
reflex of present interests leads to an attenuated understanding both of the
historical process, and of the ways in which time is materially embodied
(Jones and Yarrow 2013). In the context of anthropological discussions
of heritage, Christoph Brumann suggests that conceptual frameworks that
privilege contemporary social relations and interests render historic artefacts
as ‘empty signifiers’ (Brumann 2014), whose material properties participate
obliquely, if at all, in the meanings that are (socially) made of them. Some
time ago, Marilyn Strathern (1990) highlighted how the anthropological
move to put artefacts in social and historical context forecloses consideration
of the temporal contexts that artefacts themselves contain. Ingold (2010)
has made a related point about the ways artefacts enfold time, as much
as they are enfolded within it. Yet even if such conceptual insights have
accompanied renewed anthropological attention to the material ‘stuff’ of
which time is literally made, ethnographic approaches continue to situate
this interest through fieldwork that routinely privileges the spoken words
and practical interactions of people. My point is not to suggest that this is
problematic per se, but that it locates the question of what time is and how
we can understand it. Even if anthropologists are increasingly committed
to conceptual frameworks that highlight how time is folded into things,
it remains the case that our interests have rarely been accompanied by
the kinds of expertise that would allow us to investigate these dynamics
with anything like the sophistication of archaeological research. Lucas’s
discussion is a useful reminder to anthropologists of the interpretive limits that
ethnographic investigation imposes, and of the ways in which these necessarily
locate our understandings of time in general and of the contemporary in
particular.
My comments so far have attempted to draw out the reflexive implications
of Lucas’s discussion of time in archaeology for anthropological enquiry. In
my final comments, I want to suggest that anthropological approaches to time

might in turn help to locate some conceptual limits of the approach that Lucas
espouses. For Lucas, temporality is a product of ‘things in relation to one
another’ (p. 11) and from this perspective contemporaneity is conceptualized
as a matter of ‘how temporality is bound to an object’s identity and how it
mediates its relation to other objects’ (p. 11). This ‘ANT view of consociality’,
may, as Lucas contends, have the benefit of enabling a more spatially and
temporally distributed understanding of the person. One can certainly see
how the approach makes sense in relation to archaeological methodologies
that routinely route interpretive relations through things. Writing as an
anthropologist and ethnographer, however, the approach seems in some
respects to narrow the interpretive possibilities for tracing relations, insofar
as these become primarily if not exclusively a question of action, and ‘things’
become their primary locus. Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis have
recently suggested that in actor-network-theory approaches, ‘the range of
affectation that is open to actants, human and otherwise, consists entirely and
uniquely of one type of action, which ultimately is a kind of mechanics in its
insistence that all phenomena can be explained by a micro- and macrophysics
of action’ (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2014, 71). Lucas’s formulation of
contemporaneity borrows explicitly from ANT approaches and seems to
imply a similar ‘physics of action’. From a more ethnographic perspective,
one might then wonder about the range of ways in which relations of
contemporaneity can be defined and understood. While Lucas is right to
highlight how the material properties of artefacts and assemblages themselves
participate in these meanings, relationships of contemporaneity are also
and indissolubly a product of how people think about, talk about and
conceptualize these. Contemporaneity involves relationships between objects,
and Lucas’s account makes evident how archaeologists are uniquely placed
to draw out the relational implications of their material properties. However,
contemporaneity can also be seen as a function of the various ways in which
people narrate and conceptualize their relations with one another and with
the non-human elements of the worlds they inhabit.
While Lucas is himself keen to open ways of tracing temporal relations, the
invocation of ANT therefore seems in some ways to work against this aim. My
broader point is not simply to highlight the diverse ways in which temporal
relations – and hence contemporaneity – can be traced, but also to foreground
the extent to which the specification of relations will always be relative to the
conceptual framework(s) with which one starts. Here, my comments rejoin
and extend Lucas’s paper in drawing attention to the situated nature of our
own interpretive artefacts. An archaeologist examining contemporaneity as a
matter of ‘things in relation to one another’ might produce a different sense of
the contemporary to an anthropologist whose ethnographic sensibilities make
her more attuned to relations made through spoken words, or the everyday
interactions of people. What we know about time is situated by how we know
about it – by the kinds of sensibility, vision and interpretive framework we
employ as much as the theories and concepts. Anthropology and archaeology
do not look at the same world differently – they make the world available to
themselves in qualitatively different kinds of ways. From this perspective, time
is not so much a shared object as a shared set of interests. Each discipline

36 discussion
constitutes a perspective on the other that helps to locate and define these
limits. As such anthropology and archaeology’s mutual interests – in time in
general and in the contemporary in particular – lie as much in how these
disciplines differ as in what they share.

doi:10.1017/S1380203815000082
Contemporizing the contemporary Gavin Lucas
I would like to thank all my respondents for taking the time to read my paper
and offer their critical and constructive feedback; in their varied responses,
they have highlighted aspects which I had not considered, challenged
me to elaborate on some of the less clear points I made and revealed
ambiguities or even contradictions in how I have articulated the concept of
contemporaneity. Rather than respond individually, I would like to try and
answer what I see as the main points which collectively emerge from these
comments.
One of these concerns the form of archaeological narrative that my
investigation into the concept of contemporaneity would imply. Indeed,
I would be the first to acknowledge that my discussion at the end of
the paper regarding this matter was somewhat perfunctory, to say the
least. From the comments, I want to address two related problems that
arose. First, both Olivier and Jones pick up on a similar issue that they
regard as problematic: the implicit reversion to a conventional chronological
narrative of sequence which would seem to contradict the very claims I
make in this paper. Second, and in contrast, Crossland sees my rejection of
chronological time as actually preventing the possibility of acknowledging
other, specifically past, perceptions of time and contemporaneity. These
are both important points so I will respond as best I can to each in
turn.
Olivier is perhaps the most direct when he challenges my use of the concept
of consociality as being simply another version of conventional history and
suggests that I am forcing archaeological matter to conform to historical time
rather than the time of memory. There are some important points I would like
to make in response here. First, I am troubled by this dichotomy of memory
and history which Olivier deploys, a dichotomy which is central both to
his very important work on archaeology and time (Olivier 2011) and also
generally, it seems, to French historiography after the studies of Pierre Nora
(1989). The basic assumption here seems to be that events (i.e. history) are
sequential but objects (i.e. archaeology) are not. This is why Olivier stresses
the persistence of his pottery sherds in a feature two centuries later; it is
not a point about formation processes and residuality but rather a point
about artefacts not having any kind of temporality in a chronological sense.
The sherds are no more 6th-century than 3rd-century. They exist equally in
both times. However, there are two problems here. First, in Olivier’s own
example of the backfilled silo pit, the very possibility of acknowledging the

Contemporizing the contemporary 37
survival of these older sherds depends on a historical time frame. It was

radiocarbon dating that showed the incongruity in the first place. Even to talk
about the non-historicity of the archaeological object presupposes historical
temporality as a context. Moreover, the fact remains that while the sherds
could be described as equally 3rd-century B.C. and 6th-century B.C., they
could not be described as 10th-century B.C. They did not exist at that time.
Which challenges the notion that objects have no historical temporality; I
would argue that they do by virtue of the fact that at some point in historical
time they come into existence, and probably at some future point they will
cease to exist.
The second problem concerns the relevance of those pottery sherds. In
purely chronological terms, one cannot call them 6th-century any more than
3rd-century – or indeed 21st-century, as those sherds still persist. But so
what? How does one use this recognition in a meaningful way? One can
talk about these sherds in terms of memory, but I do not see how using
memory is necessarily counter to talking about history. These sherds can be
deployed in a narrative about 3rd-century Marsal in Lorraine, or about a
21st-century excavation in the same locale. One could even juxtapose these
narratives together with a third about the vessels these sherds came from in
the 6th century B.C. in a non-linear way. But however you do it, it is hard
to frame any narrative without reference to historical time, simply because
the relevance of these sherds and their agency changes depending on which
time frame you choose to discuss them in. For me, the interesting challenge is
not opposing memory and history but juxtaposing them in ways which deal
adequately with what I have called modes of persistence and attentiveness to
a more thoughtful concept of contemporaneity. It simply means we cannot
reduce the presence of 6th-century sherds in a 3rd-century feature or a 21st-
century excavation to one of mere residuality.
It is this issue of juxtaposition that I also want to emphasize in regard to
Jones’s concerns about my use of the term ‘gradients of consociality’ (p. 12).
Jones suggests that the concept could return us to a successional view of time
– or what Olivier might call historical time. In the example of my relation
to Lincoln, for example, I suggested that my consociation with him was
separated by several degrees because he died a century ago and my relation to
him is mediated only through other objects, directly or indirectly connected to
him. These degrees of separation constitute the gradient. Like the opposition
of history and memory, I would argue that we cannot forgo successional
time and simply replace it with a temporality of the contemporary. Rather,
the structure of archaeological narratives is best seen as the conjunction of
successional time and relational time. The gradients of consociality are defined
both by the persistence of stable objects (e.g. Lincoln, the body) and by the
entanglement or co-relation of objects (e.g. Lincoln’s body with Lincoln’s
coat) which constitute more fluid assemblages. Measuring persistence depends
on successional time; measuring entanglement depends on relational time
or contemporaneity. This point also relates to Jones’s misgivings about my
presumption of persistence, where he asks about the conditions for stability or
ephemerality. These are, indeed, crucial questions, but ones which would take
us into another realm of questioning concerning the integrity of objects and

38 discussion
their identity, even drawing us into debates about relational and essentialist
ontologies. It also relates to questions of scale and how far one might be able
to stretch gradients of consociality, a point raised by both Jones and Yarrow.
I am not sure I could do any justice to such questions in the short space
available here, so I leave these for another occasion.
If Olivier and Jones are both correct in seeing successional or historical
or chronological time as still embedded in my argument, Crossland takes
my initial rejection of such time as a point of departure to question whether
my arguments do not deny other past perceptions of temporality. This is a
complex issue which Crossland proficiently explores, and in response I need to
clarify a number of points. First, I do not ultimately wish to ‘dispense with any
notion of succession altogether’, as both Olivier and Jones already observed.
This phrase was used in a very specific context, in terms of the relation
between tensed time – that is, between past, present and future – I still do
not see the relation between these terms as successional. However, there are
other temporal terms which are fundamentally successional (e.g. earlier/later)
and these guarantee that there will always be an aspect of time which remains
successional. Second, it is precisely the non-successional nature of the past–
present–future nexus that would allow us to explore other perceptions of the
past in the past.
It is at this point that I think my articulation of writing archaeology in
the mode of the contemporary was unclear and this is why Crossland has
perhaps misunderstood me on this issue. To elaborate on this, I want to use
her own very clear exposition in which she draws on Koselleck’s asymmetry
of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’, as these illustrate my
argument equally well. As she puts it: ‘Koselleck’s conceptual categories of the
present–past “space of experience” and the future “horizon of expectation”
provide a framework for examining the conditions of historical possibility’
(p. 17–18). This is also the point I was trying to make, albeit very poorly, and
more specifically to argue that these very conditions of historical possibility
change over time because of shifts in the gradients of consociality. While it
may seem perverse to quote a section of my own text, I do it precisely because
it clearly needed further elaboration:
A narrative that starts at 500 B.C. and ends at 400 B.C. has a different
set of agential possibilities than one which spans 400–300 B.C. This field
of possibilities changes as one slides the end point back or forward, and
therefore, depending on what we take as our point of reference, history will
appear slightly different each time (p. 14).
Contained here is a clear sense that successional time has not been dispensed
with, but also a clear imperative to retain this idea of temporal asymmetry.
The fulcrum between Koselleck’s ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of
expectation’ will shift. The horizon of expectation was most certainly different
in 400 B.C. than it was in 300 B.C., as was the space of experience; it is
precisely the idea of consociality and its gradients that, I suggest, we can
use to explore these differences. Indeed, if one relies solely on successional
time, then it seems to me that such a task is more likely to be foreclosed.
Moreover, surely Koselleck’s temporal taxonomy underlines the point that the

relations of past, present and future are not successional at all, but rather more
relational. I believe that the same non-successional character of tensed time is
also quite clear in Karlsson’s discussion of Heideggerian temporality, which
had a clear influence on Koselleck. Contemporaneity, specifically consociality,
then, actually allows us to do what Crossland wants, rather than preventing
it.
Writing archaeological narratives is one thing, but is that all that is at stake
here? Crossland, Karlsson and Olivier raise questions of the broader relevance
of such discussions of time in archaeology. Karlsson asks what it might mean
to live contemporaneity as opposed to just writing it. Drawing on Heidegger,
Karlsson hints at the possibility of archaeology as an existential project,
both individually and collectively. How does thinking about contemporaneity
challenge our perceptions of what it is to be human – to be an archaeologist,
in fact? In a sense, what is at stake here is the broader relevance and purpose
of archaeology and what Karlsson seems to say is that this, too, is a question
bound up with our notions of time. And he is right. The contemporaneity
of the archaeological record which I discuss is not simply about how we
might write narratives about archaeological material, about the consociality
of things like potsherds and burials; it is also about our own consociality with
that thing we call the archaeological record, indeed with anything which has
been on this earth far longer than us. Our understanding of that consociation
shapes our actions in the present – and future. As both Olivier and Karlsson
effectively argue, doing archaeology is not simply writing or talking about
the past, it is a fully temporal project where the past matters, because of its
intersection with the present and future. This is both an existential (Karlsson)
and political (Olivier) question and one which is not really drawn out in my
discussion but with which I concur. To what extent, though, are the answers
to these questions given by this consociation, or are they rather a matter of
ideology, as Olivier suggests?
It is in the same spirit that I read Yarrow’s comment on my restricted focus
on contemporaneity in relation to objects; as he points out, an anthropologist
may see things differently, where contemporaneity is something articulated
through discourse or practice. In the realm of the spoken word or
interpersonal interactions, a very different sense of contemporaneity might
emerge. While I appreciate this point – and especially the point that I am
articulating a very archaeological perspective on contemporaneity – I am
wary of polarizing the world of discourse from that of material things.
In my discussion on Lincoln the myth versus Lincoln the man, I tried to
argue that consociation is a concept which can be used to cut across such
distinctions. Even if we only talk about Lincoln, Lincoln consociates (his coat,
the memorial, the movie) will not be easy to extricate from such talk. At the
same time, Crossland, Karlsson, Olivier and Yarrow all impel me to question
whether the political or ethical dimension to contemporaneity is something
that is adequately captured in my use of the term ‘consociation’ and especially
in the object-centred focus of my discussion. Of that, I do have doubts. Even
Olivier’s discussion of presentism, as a dominant historical ideology of our
time, seems to be rather ambiguous in asserting the weight of historical events
in shaping this ideology and the ability of this ideology to be disconnected

40 discussion
from the material world (not to mention the irony of this in terms of Olivier’s
own critique of historical narrative).
It is Crossland’s comments, however, that perhaps go deepest in regard
to the political and ethical dimension of my discussion. Relating to the point
raised earlier about the potential implicit in my position for denying past/other
perceptions of time and contemporaneity, she also questions the way this
does not address how certain pasts are privileged, how certain people, events,
stories are excluded from history – and excluded from being contemporary.
Reading Crossland’s comments, I was immediately reminded of the work
of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his book Silencing the past (1995), where a
politics of elision and selection infiltrates every stage in the production of
the historical archive. This is about politicizing source criticism, politicizing
formation theory. I have discussed Trouillot in my work on the archaeological
record (Lucas 2012; also see Wylie 2008), and while I emphatically see the
politics of history as inextricably entangled with ontological questions about
the nature of the archaeological record, it is certainly not a theme I have
elaborated much upon and Crossland is right to draw attention to it. But the
ontology is important.
Thus I have reservations about the way Crossland articulates this issue,
through a typical Peircean triplet of history-as-trace, history-as-past and
history-as-interpretation. In particular, I find the idea of history-as-past deeply
troubling – as something distinct from history-as-interpretation and history-
as-trace. Trouillot’s work was precisely an attempt to bypass the whole
opposition of history-as-past versus history-as-interpretation by focusing
solely on history-as-trace (i.e. as archival production). This is how I also
see the matter. We don’t need a historical past, nor do we need history as
representation. Objects, people, ideas – they enfold the past, present and
future in a way that does not require such separation, which is how I have
tried to discuss the idea of contemporaneity in my paper.
I have only touched on some of the more immediate concerns I perceived
in the comments of Crossland, Jones, Karlsson, Olivier and Yarrow and tried
to respond to them as best I can in relation to my original arguments. Perhaps
in the process, I have misrepresented them, but I hope not. However, it is also
clear there are a number of issues I left hanging, issues which clearly require
more work, as these commentators have all so eloquently demonstrated. One
concerns the question of identity in relation to time; as Jones remarks, the idea
of persistence presupposes stable identities. When is Lincoln still Lincoln? Is
there an answer to this that can take us beyond the sterile riddle of how many
grains of sand make a heap? Another issue hinges on the distinction between
contemporaneity as an operational concept one uses in archaeology (as I
have argued in my paper) and contemporaneity as a culturally relative idea
related to other projects – political (Crossland), anthropological (Yarrow)
or existential (Karlsson). In one sense, we should be wary about overstating
the distinction between these two uses of contemporaneity; at the same time
they cannot be completely collapsed. If I have tried to argue against certain
dichotomies in my response (e.g. between events and objects, history and
memory, language and materiality), others have seemed to become more
entrenched (e.g. successional and relational time). But underlying this second

issue is another one – between archaeology as epistemology and archaeology

as ethics. This may just turn out to be the most important one in the face of
current ontological discussions in archaeology regarding agency, relationality
and materiality.
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Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 1–15

∗ Gavin Lucas, University of Iceland. Email: [email protected].

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highlight another, often implicit idea connected to this, that of anachronism.

Contemporaneity in the archaeological record: a critique of synchronism

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Here, the term Childe used for contemporaneity – synchronism – is highly

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project on digital technologies called STAR (Semantic Technologies for

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Contemporaneity of the archaeological record: a critique of anachronism

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knowledge. This period saw the growth of publications on historical and

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Despite this, I am uncertain whether anachronism itself is a very useful

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Consociality and writing archaeology in the contemporary mode

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mode means acknowledging the relevance of the time frame, it means

Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 15–20

The knots of narrative.

In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts

∗ Zoë Crossland, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA.

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non-contemporaneity (cf. Derrida 1994)? How should we make sense of

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a framework for examining the conditions of historical possibility. These

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Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 21–24

Assemblages, relationality and recursivity. Comments on

I warmly welcome Gavin Lucas’s discussion of time and contemporaneity.

∗ Andrew Meirion Jones, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, England.

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chronologies using various radiometric dating techniques, the discipline will

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Throughout the paper contemporaneity is taken as a given. Things persist

Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 24–28

Existential contemporaneity. Or what we as

∗ Håkan Karlsson, Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg,

Sweden. Email: [email protected].

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Lucas and contemporaneity

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synchronism and anachronism and the traditional linear and successional

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Archaeological Dialogues 22 (1) 28–31

∗ Laurent Olivier, National Museum of Archaeology, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. Email:

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